Need for Speed
Recently, I decided to make a go for a really intriguing e-book. I’m usually skeptical of e-books because the authors don’t have to really suffer the typical wrath of publishers and editors like traditional print authors do and really anything goes in the electronic world. So how do you know that a particular e-book is going to live up to its claims, have good research behind it, etc.? Well, I took the dive and was impressed by the content, but not by the process.
I ordered the e-book nearly 6 months ago. I got the completed 2nd edition today. Now, in all fairness, they did say when I ordered the 2nd edition that it was not complete. But there was a promise I would get the book I ordered and in a timely fashion.
Let this be a lesson to all of us: there is a need for speed, and the internet only accelerates that desired speed. The response time on this one was a little over 6 months and in internet years, that’s like a decade. Well, maybe not that much, but it’s way too much time, especially if the book itself involves internet development tutorials. When delivering a product online, it ought to be instant, where possible. People generally expect some kind of instantaneous result. I learned this principle with a site I started back in 1999, Piano Public Domain. The site had some static links to PDF files of classical sheet music. Not long after I started the site I realized there needed to be income to finance the hosting, domain name registration, and everything else, so I started selling options to customers. It wasn’t instantaneous, and I made hardly anything. In fact, I made more from advertising cause customers were leaving for greener pastures. This year, we rolled out with a powerful site that serves this need for speed better than before, and sales have increased over 1000%.
So whether it’s an e-book or an online service, make sure that you provide something, anything, instantaneously.
