But with Take Control we really had decided this was something we wanted to put a lot of effort into and realized it just couldn't take off in a month, that we were going to have to do it more for the long perspective."

What motivated you both then, and were there any obstacles to creating TidBITS?

TidBITS certainly seemed to be a pioneer in using the internet for the purposes you had -- and, holy cow, free, too!

Were you insane?

It did. Because we were heavily involved with our MUG, there was always a sense of what the point of sharing information was. In fact, for that reason, and because we worked as the newsletter editors for our MUG, TidBITS has always offered any Mac user group that wants reprints of our articles for free, as long as they credit us.

We know how hard it is to get content when a publication is due.

(laughs again) We basically sent out mail on our mailing lists. That was all there was back then. Just pure word of mouth.

We had a subscription increase during 1993-95 when my "Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh" book was a huge best-seller.

That was also the heyday of internet growth. Not that people aren't getting online now, but back then people were online exploring avidly, checking everything out. They had to find everything possible. But there wasn't a lot for the Macintosh then, so TidBITS became a primary venue for that information.

It wasn't that hard to do at the time. You know, when you are a 22 years old, just out of college, and you are doing something that HUNDREDS of people are interested in doing -- and you had to keep in mind that back in 1990 when, if a hundred people were doing ANYTHING, it was a pretty big deal.

It wasn't until 1992 that we made any money at it, and certainly not that much.

I guess I've never really thought of TidBITS in the "success or failure" proposition. It's a success because it exists. If it wasn't successful, it wouldn't exist.

As the industry has grown it has become harder and harder to do TidBITS.

Not because we are publishing more -- the issues have grown in size over the past 2 years -- but because so much is happening within the industry and it requires us to be on top of many different topics and THEN pick out what's actually interesting to write about.

There is also a factor of topics worth watching but which aren't quite ready to write about, so you end up doing a lot of work that never becomes an article, or maybe never get an article out of it but you do benefit by learning a lot about that topic.

Tonya and I had been increasingly frustrated by the world of book publishing, magazines as well. With TidBITS we could get a huge audience and even sponsors for the issues, but sometimes it feels better to be recompensed for your work directly.

One of our thoughts was to create something that we could put out and sell to an individual right then and there. We had some paper books that hadn't sold well for a variety of reasons, and we thought, you know, all of these things that drive us nuts about the publishing world, there's no reason they have to be.

If you are an established publishing company, it's hard to break free -- you have so much overhead, so many people, tradition built-in. But if we were to start something new, we didn't have to do it all the same way.

That's really how it started, we had a sense that we could come up with a new way to do publishing, and give us an opportunity to experiment with or solve all of the problems we had run into in the traditional publishing industry.

Other than Tonya and myself, I think at TidBITS issue #256 Geoff Duncan joined us as technical editor, then a couple of years later Jeff Carlson did, and Matt Neuburg, Mark Anbinder, and Glenn Fleishman have joined us along the way. Although, Mark Anbinder, to be fair, has been helping from the beginning. He kept TidBITS going when we moved to Seattle; we didn't have internet access for over a month -- you couldn't just GET internet access back then -- so he put out several issues while we were entirely offline.

So, roughly about 7 of us make up the staff.

That's a very good question.

Yes, PDF had to be well-established, but that has been true for the past 5-6 years or so. It was the limiting factor before then, yes. I don't think we would have done this if PDF had not been around.

It's not that we are huge fans of PDF, but one thing that we believed to be true about ebooks that you are trying to sell is that they need to be objects. If it was just HTML pages and the graphics were all loose, here and there, it doesn't feel like an object, and would be significantly more difficult to get your head around.

(laughs) Well, that's an interesting -- and on-going -- experiment.

Our initial idea was to do 50-page books and sell them for $5 each. There is a rule of thumb in the publishing industry of "10 cents a page." Although that breaks down with longer books; a 700-page book is not going to sell for $70. But for the usual size that computer books are, at the 200-300 page range, that formula is pretty accurate ($20-30 for printed books).

Now at 50 pages, you'd never find a paper book that size, it's not that big to stand out on book shelves. And there is also not enough money in the margins to make it worthwhile to a publishing company. Most printed books sell to a book store for roughly half of the cover price, so a $20 book will sell to the bookstore for $10 and then the author will earn a percentage based on the selling price -- so if an author earns 10% royalties, then he or she will earn $1 per book. So you don't earn much money on your average book.

We said, 'OK, let's offer our authors 50 percent' because our costs are so low. Even at $5, our authors were earning more per book than on a paper book, with standard royalties. We wanted to make sure our authors would make a good amount.

It evolving. We knew that we had to stay away from the price range of most paper books, which were longer (page length). We wouldn't come off well in the comparison (on page length/price). But then we started to produce ebooks that were 100-pages long and beyond, and were frankly just a lot more work for us, more than we anticipated. As topics became more complicated, the books grow in size. That's when we bumped up those books up to $10.

We were also aware that ebooks were a hard sell, something buyers were not used to. We felt it important to keep the cost as low as possible to eliminate that initial obstacle. So we wanted the "Oh, $5? No problem" experience for the buyer.

We do OK. Our joke has long been that none of us are at the "private island" stage yet.

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