Can Packt Publishing be making any money?

Recently, I was looking for some books on developing desktop applications for Ubuntu. It seemed that Packt Publishing had the most recent titles, which was one of the criteria I was using for selecting the books. However, I noticed that many of them were available as E-books for $5, compared to a hard copy price of $50 or more. After my searching, I then saw numerous Packt ads highlighting the $5 price. How can they (or their authors) be making any money at that price? To me, this removes incentive to spend the effort to create a book of 300 pages or more to sell for $5 a copy. Am I missing something here?

Lazyweb, I am trying out Emacs to play with Org-mode, any tutorials I should look at?

Thoughts from a user

After listening to Dave Winer’s voicemailcast today, I decided to create my own in response. I used Little Outliner to create a set of show notes (link), the podcast is shown below. Let me know what you think…anyone, anyone at all….

Link to Internet Archive version of show notes

Paying for the development of software

I recently read a post on funding of software developed for academic/research use, the author stated that many grants are for new applications, and that funding agencies should consider supporting existing open source software that goes unfunded. There were links to papers such as the development of AstroPy, and a report by Nadia Eghbal on funding of Internet digital infrastructure development. I have touched on this topic before in a recent post about the development/funding story of the Node Package Manager. All of these stories touch on some common problems:

People write software, put it out on the web, people use it or they don’t.
If a lot of people start using it, and start asking for features/fixes, how do those get done? How do the developers get reimbursed for their time and effort?
What if a business uses open source software at no direct cost? How can they depend on that software being supported and available?

Businesses that develop physical products that contain custom software pay for that software as part of the development cost of the product. This may be the best example of funding for software development.

To me, the idea of a subscription fee makes the most sense. The user paying a fee gets a specified level of support, for example, or early access to new versions. The developer gets a steadier stream of income than one-time payments (like for smartphone apps). There are other problems to address that I am not going to solve in this post, but people who develop applications should consider these topics before starting (they should “count the costs”).

via Stephen Downes, a good set of rules to help a paper speak to its audience.

Examples of how political news could be presented

I attribute much of my success in 2019 to the practices of:

writing to develop my thoughts
learning to focus

Interesting news reading workflow from Frank McPherson:

@brentsimmons I use River5 and when I find something I want to read I send it to Radio3 to add it to an RSS feed that is monitored by IFTTT to add to Instapaper. Basically it’s my replacement for Radio Userland. I am nervous about being dependent on Dave to keep Radio3 running.