Thanks, I enjoyed the article. I've bought a couple creative commons books (PDF and printed), both to have the physical artifact and to send gratitude to the author, in a form that unambiguously means something. I rarely see a pay-what-you-want option, but that would make sense to me. Buying a free PDF isn't really like buying an apple or a manufactured good, it feels more like buying music on Bandcamp. It costs nothing to copy a file, but I still want to send what I can.

Sadly I haven't been very satisfied with print on demand books. It can be serviceable for textbooks, it does make prints a lot more accessible, but the quality has been pretty disappointing for me. When I buy a POD I often end up reading the PDF instead, which seems a bit wasteful.

> I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back

Thanks for that, it’s very informative. I contemplated publishing a book that way and never actually got that far into the planning phase. Do you think things have changed much since then?

When selling a product through a reseller, the markup is around 80-100%. I was horrified by this in the 80s, but soon learned that the resellers would be out of business otherwise.

The reason resellers exist is they do the marketing, warehousing, shipping, customer service, etc.