Chris Dixon

Experiment: blog in Kindle book form

There is an amazing amount of useful, free information available on tech blogs for fledgling tech entrepreneurs (this list is a great place to start). I think sometimes we techies forget that this wealth of content is unknown to the non-startup world. I was reminded of this recently when I met a first-time entrepreneur who said when he was first starting out he tried finding books on Amazon, Googling for stuff etc. He described it as an epiphany the first time he stumbled upon Fred Wilson’s blog, which then led him to Brad Feld, Mark Suster, Eric Ries, Venture Hacks, etc.

So this weekend I thought I’d try an experiment. I took about 100 of my blog posts (the ones that I thought were most “evergreen”), bundled them as a PDF and submitted them to the Kindle Store. The Kindle submission process was surprisingly easy. You give your book a name and upload the PDF and then choose pricing.  They force you to charge a minimum of $0.99.  Also, strangely, if you charge less than $2.99, Amazon takes 70% of the revenue, but if you charge between $2.99-$10 they only keep 30%.

I decided to price my book at $2.99 and donate all of the proceeds (~$2 book) to HackNY, a non-profit that “keeps the kids off the Street” (encourages college students to join/start tech startups instead of working on Wall Street). All of the content in the book is available for free on cdixon.org. The only reason to buy the book is to get this blog in a different format and to support a good charity. It is available in the Kindle Store here.

I don’t expect many people to buy the book but maybe some first-time entrepreneurs will stumble on it and from there discover more tech blogs. Think of it as “Kindle SEO” for tech blogs.

Finally, I am having trouble getting the links to work on the Kindle version. I’m not sure if this is an Amazon policy or if I am just doing something wrong (the links work fine in the PDF I uploaded to Amazon). So here is an alternative version on Scribd that has working links.

  • http://twitter.com/semilshah Semil Shah

    Great idea, the convert to PDF so folks can read on-the-go is worth it.

  • http://www.websterisk.com Josh Webb

    I just recently wrote about a similar epiphany: http://www.websterisk.com/2011/04/13/canon/ I consider these folks canon when it comes to entrepreneurship, tech strategy, and VC.

    Chris, you seriously almost made the list, but like Horowitz, I haven’t been reading you for as long (but I am here now, so we’re both ok). I love your prescience, and your curmudgeon-y stance on all things bullshit. Keep up the good work.

  • http://prettygraph.com/ Hrishi Mittal

    I’ve been looking for a way to convert blog feeds to PDFs and Kindle books. How did you make your PDF?

    I found http://kindlefeeder.com to be good for getting the latest posts from a blog onto my Kindle, but I couldn’t find a way for it to send me all the old posts from a blog.

    http://blog2book.pothi.com is the closest I’ve found to a site which can convert a blog feed into a PDF. It’s not great looking but it works. I used it to get the posts from my favourite blogs and then emailed the PDF to my @free.kindle.com account.

  • http://twitter.com/readbeam ReadBeam

    Check out http://readbeam.com . I just started it as a side project out of frustration that many niche magazines are not available for non-US Kindle readers.
    Currently it’s not exactly niche magazines, but by the end of this week I’ll expand the service so that you can write your own recipes to convert e.g. feeds in high quality epub or mobi ebooks and have them mailed to you on a schedule. You can scrape sites, convert feeds and everything else you can imagine. See a plethora of recipes here: https://github.com/readbeam/recipes what is publicly available right now.
    These are top-of-the-line e-books, supporting all the reading and navigation features of the Kindle and other readers.

  • http://twitter.com/bjh_ip Ben Hoyle

    It’s a good idea. I was a bit sceptical at first of buying kindle editions of otherwise free material on the Internet, but the price is near nothing and is well worth the convenience.

    A tip to quickly generate a Kindle-format “book” from blog posts is to use Instapaper. It offers a downloadable “Kindle-version” of saved websites and blog posts in a readable form. I often blitz the Internet, using a browser button to save 10 or 20 interesting blog posts to Instapaper that I can then download and read on the Kindle at my leisure.

    To generate content in Kindle format check out Calibre or Mobipublisher – both free (some cleaning up work required though).

  • http://twitter.com/inthecompanyof Benjamin Southworth

    First off, thank you, I look forward to reading all the posts!

    Secondly, thank you for introducing me to HackNY, that seems like an awesome project..

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  • http://technbiz.blogspot.com paramendra

    You stole my idea. http://goo.gl/fb/wRImB :-)

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Pacheco/502136920 Dan Pacheco

    Our four-month-old BookBrewer startup (http://bookbrewer.com) lets you import full-content RSS feeds, organize the posts into a chapter outline, edit and enhance the posts and create a fully compliant ePub file.

    You can then download the DRM-free ePub to submit to Amazon and others, or have us to do it for you. The nice thing about having an ePub is that it will work for Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Kobo, Google Editions and basically everyone other than Amazon. Kindle has great reach, but its market share has fallen to around 60% over the last year.

    We can also turn your ePub into a Print on Demand title that people can order for as little as $4 a pop, with the ability to mark up the price and pocket the difference. Could be another way for you to help your non-profit.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Thatcher-Clay/704004 Thatcher Clay

    Thanks Chris, this is great, and for a great cause. I am embarrassed to say that I am one of those fledging entrepreneurs without a clue of where to look for good material. For what its worth, my struggle to find material is less about the form, be it book or blog, but more about the content. I have found very few books that really capture the helpful raw nuggets of insight to help guide the way, and blogs are often too crammed with rambling thought to capture much meaning. I have only found a handful of blogs (yours being one of them) which bridge a middle ground, and I look forward to checking out the links you included above as well. Thanks again.

  • http://twitter.com/LexInterior Alexis Peterka

    What a fantastic way to leverage your writing and the Kindle/Scribd tech to do good for both consumers of the blog and a great non-profit like HackNY. Good on ya, Chris. I hope other creators of valuable content follow suit.

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  • http://www.kidmercuryblog.com kidmercury

    kids go to the Street because that’s where the money is. the same reason investors go to the Street. to really get kids off the Street, people need to agree to stop going there, and to create new financial markets and new monetary systems.

    • http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

      i think that’s definitely true. however, when i go to schools to talk
      about startups, i’m always surprised how unaware they are about the
      fact that there are startups who pay good salaries, have fun working
      environments etc. so i think partly it’s an awareness issue which is
      what HackNY is trying to address.

  • http://redesignmobile.com Rocky Agrawal

    Terrific idea!

  • http://arnoldwaldstein.com awaldstein

    Thnx for this.

    I was unaware of this and see someone taking it beyond the haphazard ‘Kindle SEO’ idea and building a marketplace and creating libraries that will drive awareness into new sectors who just don’t find our blogs at all.

    I love the idea. I like the idea more when you think of how to create interest intersections to push the sourcing process for new audiences.

    Does this intersect with what you can do with onswipe?

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  • http://www.facebook.com/lillian.j.chan Lillian J Chan

    Thanks for sharing this medium! I didn’t know it can be that easy to make a product for Kindle! It was nice to meet you at NYU Startup week! :)

    Blessings,
    Lily

  • http://www.matthewcornell.org/ Matthew Cornell

    Can’t wait to learn about the results. As an experiment, what are you measuring (# sales?, any sales at all? comments from buyers?). Also, how long will you let it run? If you’d like a tool to help your experiment along (including tracking numbers), how about putting it into Edison, the Think, Try, Learn experimenter’s journal? http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/

  • http://www.StartBreakingFree.com Brian Armstrong

    Hi Chris,

    I bought the bundle and just wanted to say I’m really enjoying ready your blog in Kindle format. There is a ton of good stuff in there that I would have otherwise never read just because of the bright screen at night, and blog format (sorted by time).

    I’ve noticed that some of the better books I’ve read over the last few years (Rework, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell) came out of this “blog first” format. There is something about it that really gives the author a chance to gauge reader response, be succinct, and hone his/her thoughts over time. I think this could be a good trend for how books get written.

    Anyway, I would say successful experiment!
    Brian

    • http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

      thanks! glad it was useful.

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  • Anonymous

    Really enjoyed (re)reading your posts on the kindle (and making a small donation to HackNY).

    I wonder about the user experience, or just plain experience, of your posts as a book as is vs. what can be done. Could you do a video intro (wouldn’t work on the kindle hardware but I could see the iPhone / iPad reader providing some interesting options)? What extra notes / formatting can take the posts beyond what has already been offered?

    I think there is more than enough room for projects like these.

  • Anonymous

    Really enjoyed (re)reading your posts on the kindle (and making a small donation to HackNY).

    I wonder about the user experience, or just plain experience, of your posts as a book as is vs. what can be done. Could you do a video intro (wouldn’t work on the kindle hardware but I could see the iPhone / iPad reader providing some interesting options)? What extra notes / formatting can take the posts beyond what has already been offered?

    I think there is more than enough room for projects like these.

  • http://mimosaplanet.com James M Cooper

    Hi Chris,
    I’m finding the whole book publishing world really interesting at the moment, so thanks for this post! It will be interesting to see how many new people will find your blog through the Kindle Store.
    Cheers,
    James

  • http://twitter.com/lucaspiller Luca Spiller

    Great idea, however it isn’t available in the UK Kindle store. Are you able to make it available there?

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  • Anonymous

    Thanks for sharing this ‘list”!  I really got some good tips from this.  It is amazing to me the amount of entrepreneurs and investors like you that are willing to share and network resources with each other.  One thing I would like to ask you and the group if you don’t mind, is basically if you have ever bootstrapped, what was it you did that got you out of bootstrapping and into some funding?

  • Anonymous

    The nice thing about having an ePub is that it will work for Apple iBooks.
    Plumbers

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