Manning Publications has a program called MEAP. MEAP stands for Manning Early Access Program - basically buying a book as a PDF before the paper version is published, in fact, before it is even finished. Good for new technologies like ASP.NET MVC of Silverlight.
Now I know that electronic versions have a marginal cost compared to paper versions, but Manning are taking this to extreme levels;
In April, I bought the MEAP title,
The Art of Unit Testing, $24.99
By August, the completion of
The Art Of Unit Testing is being delayed so I received a $15 coupon off any other purchases, so I bought another MEAP title,
NHibernate In Action, $29.99 - $15 =
$14.99
Today (October) I get an e-mail saying that as a purchaser of
NHibernate In Action I have another $15 coupon to spend, so I bought a PDF title,
.NET Multithreading, $17.50 - $15 =
$2.50.
That is some ripple effect on a late publishing date for
The Art of Unit Testing. Many thanks to Roy Osherove for being very busy with everything else in his life.
Also, in the past few weeks I also bought Silverlight In Action, as when Microsoft released Silverlight 2 RC0 they gave 35% off another MEAP title,
Silverlight In Action, $27.50 - $9.63 =
$17.87.
Looking at this random pricing I am really, really glad I'm not an author who expects royalities. I realise that authoring a technical book is generally a zero income activity, but surely pricing like this ensures that this will be the case.