The Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide and thoughts on ebook pricing

I uploaded the fourth edition of my popular (it’s been as high as #3,300 on the Kindle store, it is frequently #1 in the Linux category, and it’s the first hit for “ubuntu” on Amazon’s search engine) Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide today, and it should be available shortly. For the fourth edition, I added a section on using key-based authentication for SSH clients and servers, instructions for altering the Unity environment in Ubuntu 12.04, and made sure everything was up to date for the latest version of Ubuntu.

I hemmed and hawed over it for much longer than I would care to admit, but I decided to try selling the book at $2.99 instead of $0.99. I came to this decision for three reasons. First, I think there is enough information in the book to justify a price of $2.99 (it’s up to 42,000 words now, and the first edition had only about 34,000), and most competing Ubuntu books that discuss server configuration cost at a minimum $16, and often quite more. Second, updating the book to reflect changes in Ubuntu is a lot of work, and I don’t want to abandon the book.

The final reason ties into this – it will be more economical for me to maintain the book at $2.99 instead of $0.99. In June, I sold 680 copies the book. To make an equivalent amount of money at $2.99, I would only need to sell 117 copies.

Granted, it might not be possible to sell that many copies at $2.99, but we’ll see. I think I will keep the price there for a month and see if the results are desirable or not.

-JM