Mark Boulton

18 Responses to “Designing and building an eBook delivery system”

1. 
   Mark Otto said on: January 26th, 2009 at 6:49 pm

   Nice post, Mark! Really enjoy see­ing the pro­cess behind pub­lish­ing your own book, as well as how you designed and built a solu­tion to accom­mod­ate your needs. 

   Would you ever con­sider pack­aging this and selling it as a sub­scrip­tion based eco­m­merce tool? I think some­thing as simple as this would catch on very eas­ily, espe­cially with such a focused work­flow and UI.

2. 
   Christopher Francis O'Donnell said on: January 27th, 2009 at 1:27 am

   Cool! It’d be cool if (pre­sum­ably some­body who didn’t pre­sum­ably agree to the terms of a developer stip­u­lat­ing that the soft­ware couldn’t be freely released) would freely release some­thing like this under the GPL. Hey, I guess I’m ask­ing for a lot there, so maybe I’ll try to build my own with Django. Have sorta given up on PHP though.

3. 
   Elliot Jay Stocks said on: January 27th, 2009 at 10:03 am

   Mate, I’ll second Mark Otto’s com­ment above: I — and I bet a lot of people — would will­ingly pay to use a sys­tem like this, so if you’re con­sid­er­ing open­ing it up, I think it’s a viable option. 

   @ Chris­topher: Free would be nice, but given the invest­ment that has undoubtedly gone into this, this — if it happened — would prob­ably need to be a paid-for thing.

4. 
   David Airey said on: January 27th, 2009 at 10:51 am

   Before read­ing the com­ments before mine, I wondered if this would be avail­able as a sub­scrip­tion tool / one-off purchase. 

   I’d be interested.

5. 
   Mark Boulton said on: January 27th, 2009 at 11:15 am

   @Mark Otto @Elliot @Christopher @David Thanks for your com­ments guys. So, what would be your pref­er­ence — a stand alone, or hos­ted solu­tion? It’s not some­thing I’d thought of (being so head down in this book), but, given the lack of some­thing sim­ilar in the mar­ket, now you’ve got me thinking…

6. 
   David Airey said on: January 27th, 2009 at 11:24 am

   You could offer a hos­ted option, where usage is paid for with a per­cent­age of the PDF sales. 

   Not sure how straight­for­ward that’d be to set-up, but I think it’s a good way forward.

7. 
   simon r jones said on: January 27th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

   inter­est­ing art­icle Mark. Do you know what tool was used to stamp the PDFs? 

   You also men­tion a phys­ical book, is there a planned date for this or are you going to see how the PDF sales go first? Per­son­ally, I always like to get my hands on the real thing and escape the monitor :)

8. 
   Mark Otto said on: January 27th, 2009 at 4:42 pm

   I think Cam­paign Mon­itor has proven that a sub­scrip­tion model works when send­ing out blasts, but I could see the bene­fits of both. 

   If you go with hos­ted, every­one signs up for an account and you get the bill for send­ing out emails blasts, host­ing files, etc. Takes a lot of prob­lems out of the users’ hands, but at a sig­ni­fic­ant cost I imagine. 

   If you go with a stand alone, the bar­rier to entry is much lar­ger. People have to install it, set up serv­ers, etc. Do authors, pub­lish­ers, and small busi­ness own­ers who would be inter­ested in this have the abil­ity to do that? Maybe, maybe not. 

   My answer I guess would have to be a hos­ted solu­tion with a sub­scrip­tion model. Easi­est way to get involved with it, low bar­rier to entry, easier to setup and use for wide vari­ety of cus­tom­ers, and I ima­gine can scale very well. 

   You should con­sider talk­ing to the guys behind Cam­paign Mon­itor and Word­Press for there opin­ions. Both have dif­fer­ent exper­i­ences with this kind of stuff. 

   And that said, I’m excited! Look­ing for­ward to any­thing about the book or this sweet little app.

9. 
   Jason Preston said on: January 28th, 2009 at 2:15 am

   Speak­ing as someone whose done a fair amount of pok­ing around for Word­Press plu­gins that do this kind of thing (there aren’t any good ones), I’d be most inter­ested in using a stan­dalone product. 

   Not sure I can guar­an­tee enough flow to pay a sub­scrip­tion for a ser­vice, but over time, I can prob­ably make back the ini­tial invest­ment if it’s pay-once…

10. 
    AndreyM said on: January 28th, 2009 at 6:30 am

    You have a very system-defined think­ing. The one thing is that I can’t think out where I can use your knowledge

11. 
    Dilip P said on: January 28th, 2009 at 7:16 am

    Hos­ted solu­tion should be the right thing to do. 

    Though it might be easy to setup a stand-alone sys­tem, there’s a bar­rier in the name of Pay­ment gate­way. It’s pricey and tiresome.So, I would sug­gest a hos­ted solution. 

    Have u guys checked out http://www.e-junkie.com/ ?

    How dif­fer­ent is Mark’s sys­tem dif­fer­ent from it?

12. 
    Ian said on: January 28th, 2009 at 1:11 pm

    Glad to see Code Igniter get­ting some expos­ure on your blog Mark, I per­son­ally love it.

13. 
    Mark Wallis said on: January 28th, 2009 at 4:46 pm

    Really nice post mark. Your art­icles are always very inter­est­ing and help­ful. BTW i am really look­ing for­ward read­ing your book.

14. 
    Mark Boulton said on: January 28th, 2009 at 11:07 pm

    @simon r jones
    
    We used a bunch of PHP scripts avail­able here: http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/setapdf-stamper/

    @Dilip P
    
    I looked into using E-Junkie. it works just fine, although I find the actual app and inter­face a little dif­fi­cult to use. E-Junkie cer­tainly is a fea­ture rich, mature applic­a­tion. I guess this applic­a­tion could be a little more bespoke and focussed — just designed to deliver licensed PDF files.

15. 
    toner dolum said on: January 30th, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    thanks

16. 
    Jason said on: February 2nd, 2009 at 6:04 am

    I’d be most inter­ested in using a stan­dalone product.

17. 
    Jon Winstanley said on: February 5th, 2009 at 3:58 pm

    As a bud­ding Code Igniter developer, it is really inter­est­ing to see the thought pro­cesses involved in the build­ing of your mini-app. 

    It meant I paid a lot of atten­tion to what was going on as I bought your book. 

    Thanks!

18. 
    Steven Grant said on: February 10th, 2009 at 3:51 pm

    I’ve just bought the book but the embed­ded font isn’t work­ing and so I get nothing :-(