Electronic version of the guide

[Dave Flanagan]

The guide is now sold out. I won't be doing a reprint as it would take years to sell and I couldn't do a second edition until they were all gone.

The obvious thing is to sell a digital copy in the interim.

I would have mild concerns about piracy but I don't think there is much I can do about it. It seems every solution is hackable so there might be no point trying to protect it and just trusting people.
The price wouldn't be much €5 maybe. And the format would be PDF.

What do people think about this?

Another advantage would be that I could update it as I go along.

[Barry]

Good idea Dave.  Piracy. a low enough price and people would probably buy it, 5 yos sounds about right, cost of a pint..

[Stephen McMullan]

Dave, I'd watermark or password lock the pdf with the name or email address of the purchaser.

That way if its passed on to a third party there is the double deterrent i.e. the identity of the person passing it on can be obtained and the person receiving can be embarrassed i.e. "you cheap skanky fecker would you not even pay the man €5 to get your own!!!"

Not real security but social ostracisation might induce fair play.

S

[Dave Flanagan]

Dave, I'd watermark or password lock the pdf with the name or email address of the purchaser.

That way if its passed on to a third party there is the double deterrent i.e. the identity of the person passing it on can be obtained and the person receiving can be embarrassed i.e. "you cheap skanky fecker would you not even pay the man €5 to get your own!!!"

Not real security but social ostracisation might induce fair play.

S

Yeah I read about a tactic called Social DRM in which the purchasers name and email are embedded on each page. I was planning on using that.

[chris rooney]

yep good plan, €5 is quite reasonable given the quality of the info. would it be feasible to offer in different formats? my phone certainly handles epub much better than pdfs

[ciaran]

Good idea, I would certainly buy it.

[Stephen McMullan]

If the electronic version rendered well on the phone, I'd say you could have quite a few sales to folks who also bought the printed guide if the price was a fiver, just for the convenience.

[Dave Flanagan]

I'm by no means an expert in the handheld area and I don't even have a fancy phone.
My understanding is that epub won't work well for something with so much graphics. Is there not free applications for Android and Iphone to view PDFs?

[Stephen McMullan]

Sé O'Hanlon was just on to me about adding an ePub export extension to the climbing.ie wiki. Of course the info in the routes database is a lot more textual and an order of magnitude less images than the bouldering guide. I'm not familiar with ePub either but I promised Sé I'd take a look - well on a Samsung Galaxy S anyway.

[shayoh]

Tony Groves gave me this link to source of an extension for outputting ePub files

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EPubExport

I don't know enough to fully understand the pros and cons of what it says but it looks worth looking into.

Congrats on selling all the guidebooks. That was a big commitment and it is great to see that you got your investment in the rest of us back.

[diarmuid smyth]

do I hear the patter of an irish bouldering app?

[Dave Flanagan]

A book like the bouldering guide has more in common with a magazine in terms of layout than a novel.  The guide converted to EPUB would bear very little resemblance to the book, it would be just text and pictures in sequence.

Stephen can you look at PDFs on your Samsung? Would this not be the way to go? Seeing as PDF will work on the computer as well.

Diarmuid an app is a lot of work. And I'm not sure what it would do over and above what a PDF of the guide does.

[Paul Brennan]

an app is a lot of work. And I'm not sure what it would do over and above what a PDF of the guide does.

All it would need to be is an animation of Chris's face saying " (insert grade here)? You've got to be joking. 5+ max" It'd give a sense of the full Irish bouldering experience.

In terms of digital guides, I think pdf is the way to go. I have the Yosemite and Squamish bigwall guides on my phone (HTC sensation) and can read them fine as pdfs. You can get Adobe reader for your phone for free. Epub would be better for a kindle or other e reader type thing, but I certainly wouldn't bring a kindle to glendo!

Nice one on selling all the guides.

[chris rooney]

i remember having problems with the old pdf guide on my phone (HTC Desire) and some other pdfs but if it works on the majority of devices then stick with that so.

[Dave Flanagan]

I'm thinking PDF. it seems fixed format EPUB works pretty well but I don't see what advantages it offers over PDF and its specific to Apple stuff so this means having to create multiple formats.