On Friday, Wired News ran a story about how Net publisher Adam Engst has finally stumbled on a good business model -- fast-turnaround e-books.

Naturally, every writer and independent publisher who read the article was thinking the same thing: Can I do this?

So I emailed TidBITS editor Engst (whom I met at an O'Reilly conference two years ago) for a couple of additional details about his adventures in e-books. Here's our exchange:

Q. When big media companies get into the e-book business, they inevitably load down their works with digital rights management. I know neither of us is a big fan of DRM. Do you include any form of copy protection? If not, have you encountered problems with file sharing?

Engst: We do absolutely no DRM at all, and I regularly check both the conventional Web (via a daily Google search on keywords only in our PDFs) and the file sharing services (much less frequently) and although I've now seen three instances of one of our ebooks appearing, they've either been taken down quickly (one was just a mistake - the guy put it on his iDisk to take home and forgot to remove it) or not actually been available.

However, we do things to imply that these are commercial works, such as putting a prominent price on the cover of each one. My theory is that people are less likely to copy something with an explicit price showing.

We also ask readers to share the books only as they would a paper book, as in "feel free to show it to a friend, but if they're using it sufficiently, ask them to buy their own copy."

I'm a strong believer in treating people as though they're good, honest people, and my experience is that if you do that, they'll act that way.

(On one early book, we tried turning on the PDF switch that prevents people from modifying the PDF. One guy complained, though it wasn't clear that he had any real reason to want to modify the PDF, and another guy found that it wouldn't print on his HP printer. So we turned that switch off and not only did it make the first guy happy, it solved the printing problem for the second. Since then we've avoided all the protections entirely.)

Q. Do you think this model would work for a more conventional book rather than a tech how-to book? I suspect authors without the name recognition of a Stephen King would be hard-pressed to sell even 500 copies at $5 to $10 a pop.

Engst: I definitely think it can work, but the hard part is knowing how to market such a book and where to find the audience. We're still learning about marketing ebooks, for sure, and if we didn't have TidBITS to start with, it would be very hard. But we're pretty unhappy with how traditional publishers market as well, so we and our authors are thinking a lot about how to do it better. We also share the marketing burden more with authors, since that's part of why they get 50% royalties. It shares the risk and reward more equally, so if they want higher rewards, they can help with the risk as well. :)

It's also important to think about how risk/reward ratio works. If you spend a long time writing a big book, the risk is high, which tends to push the price up. If you can reduce the size of the book (which also makes it easier to read onscreen), the risk drops, which makes it easier to sell for less and thus reduces the barrier to purchase, along with eliminating some of the comparison to paper books. In other words, an ebook shouldn't just be an electronic version of a paper book.