A Little Ink Blot

My role as Home-Schoolmarm has led me down a wonderfully endless path of educational links on the www. There are so many free resources out there it is easy to build a great and full curriculum on a very tight budget. There are thousands of results in a searched for list of Free resources for Teachers, but almost all of the links lead to sites with free introductory material. After perusing and using 1% to 2% of a site's great content, access to the rest requires a $$ subscription.

Then there are great newsletters you can subscribe to. A whole bunch of them from this one company with content that can't afford to purchase off the newsstand. Their html email newsletters are beautiful imitations of their websites, complete with multitudinous advertisements in many forms. Their newsletter content is introductory tidbits of articles on their main sites. Link back to the webpage the content comes from and you get several hundred more words that end with a little form box that says something to the effect of "purchase a subscription to this magazine now to read the rest of this article."

Which brings me to my great idea. If they can do it, why can't I? All these "things" I write could be serialized like a magazine or "teaching resource" and I can offer them for free to the world on a cool CMS platform. Until the reader gets to page x (or paragraph n), then there will be a "per issue" fee or a "whole book" charge to continue. I think it is called "subscription management."

I am not married to the idea that I have to see my name on the spine of a bound volume in a B&M location. I would rather have feedback and trackable interest in what I produce. Like comments on a good (inciting) blog entry.

I really do like publishing on the web. And I like digital books. And I think I can do them better than anyone else (probably not, but my ideas are better than anything I've seen out there so far). If only my enthusiasm were an indication of a saleable possibility. My gut feeling has never been "in line" with popular opinion before this, but there's always a chance...