I recently left a job where we had Mayan EDMS implemented. To help users with the system we bought the book and shared it on a network drive as an online help.
On my new job we also use Mayan EDMS but they don’t have the book and I miss some of the reference material when it comes to building indexes.
I understand the book is discontinued due to declining sales make it unprofitable.
My recommendation is to make a last sale event. Sell it at a ridiculous discount for just a month. Sometime like $.99. At this price even those most hesitant to buy it will do so and offset the cost of selling.
Another idea: Sell offline copies of the Knowledge Base. This way you can make double the profit, from subscriptions and for one time purchases.
To help users with the system we bought the book and shared it on a network drive as an online help.
This exactly why I stopped the book sales. Buying a copy of the book doesn’t give you the right to make more copies or share a single copy with multiple people concurrently. This scenario became very common at universities and companies where a single book copy was shared with thousands of users.
I issued DMCA take downs when it appeared on public facing websites but when the book hit torrent sites and sales fell to nothing it was time to move on.
Not only is what you did a breach of copyright law, it is the exactly the opposite of helping open source developers and projects when they try to raise funds.
My recommendation is to make a last sale event. Sell it at a ridiculous discount for just a month. Sometime like $.99. At this price even those most hesitant to buy it will do so and offset the cost of selling.
The shopping cart fees are $35, minimum. Payment processor charges 10%. More for some credit cards like American Express. That means at the very least, 40 copies in less than a month just to break even. Very unlikely to happen.
I have to be frank, based on what I just read, you just have a personal interest to buy the book again for $.99 instead of usual $9.
Another idea: Sell offline copies of the Knowledge Base. This way you can make double the profit, from subscriptions and for one time purchases.
Selling offline Knowledge Base copies would be a betrayal of the Knowledge Base supporters. If offline copies are ever sold, they would be a subset and not the entire repository, and the price would be higher than what the current supporters pay to make it worthwhile for them.
Finding monetary supporters for open source projects is extremely difficult, I’m not going to alienate the good ones we have, the ones keeping the servers humming and the project going.