Ebooks, to me, looked like an alternative to navigating the minefield of mediocre poker coaching. From the steady stream of micro stakes grinders and forum noobs name-checking the expensive Ebooks, we can draw conclusions and see that, inevitably, the value of that information has depreciated. Players gave up portions of their rolls to purchase information that seemingly wasn't "out there". What future for premium cutting edge content that is so hard to protect?

I purchased Bobbos book a year or so ago. It taught me stuff. At the time, it was an investment in my poker career. Now, its content looks a lot less unique and I wonder if those 7 100NL buyins could have been put to better use. (My girlfriend designed the cover for the Baluga book so we got that too.)

These players understand the depreciation of their product and adapt what they offer. Improva adds videos and other media, coaching, and updates. Aejones is updating his series. Baluga sold a "living document" which seems to mean one update. Slowhabit bangs out new material and prices it accordingly. Interestingly enough, it gets cheaper every time.

Personally, I think if those at the top are going to exploit this premium end of the market, there needs to be some improvement in the durability of the product they are offering. Writing a course of study increases their potential return over and above that of one to one coaching. However, the coach gains while the student potentially loses that invaluable mentor relationship. Ebooks are charging hopeful consumers to see what is in the box. It must be worth x because high stakes pros know how to correctly assign value right?

In general, group coaching, one on one coaching, ebooks, audiobooks, boot camps etc looks like a pretty big yet somehow immature market to me. Is spending money the way to get ahead in poker? Is there a middle way between the obvious value-for-money of video training sites and the student-mentor relationship?

This will probably move to the books board soon. With that said, you raise several intersting questions. My comments:

The game is always changing so writing cutting edge material with " durability" is impossible. It's funny to me to see people attack the Tom MCoVoy and David Sklansky material. I can tell you when I started playing poker in the early 90's that stuff was gold. The game evolved. They didn't get dumber nor are the current poker minds smarter.

Why am I not crying about what I paid for the books? I only between $10 and $25 bucks for them and they were worth every penny. I am not sure anyone who paid a couple grand or even seven hundred bucks would not question the investment in the e-books as the material becomes more of a commodity every single day which it always will. Just look at how the internet effected publishing. Newspapers as entrenched as they were are being killed by clinging to the old way of doing business.

The stuff was and is way over priced. The pricing is the problem for the student not the quality of the material.

The authors are cashing in on the success they had at there students expense. They don't all see it that way but that's what it really is.

These books priced as they are way more of a good deal for the author over the customer. Give the ebook guys credit they did something the newspaper, music business etc have not been able to do which is cash in on their franchise in the current information is a commodity world.

I have never once regretted buying any book that I have purchased except the really bad ones. I am guessing this is based on info to cost ratio.

The current e-books are way over priced (with the exception of SSNLHE) and I think that is why people are feeling like the purchases may have been a waste a year later.

+EV

A lot of it is that a good book (2p2, non poker manuals or even theory books not about poker) can be worth thousands of dollars to a person that works hard and really "gets it." But a majority of people that purchase books probably don't get enough out of it because they don't put enough into it.

Whereas I'm sure some 2p2 book buyers got well over the $20-30 it cost them to purchase their book, the average person may have only gotten $20-50 out of it.

I think the eBook material can be the same way. People charge $600 because they feel "hey, this is new info, if somebody buys this right away, studies it and understands it, they can get well over 6k out of it." In reality probably 10% or less of the people get that sick of a return on it.

Is it the author's fault? Is it the buyer's fault? As long as the author makes people aware of the product they are selling and markets it honestly, I don't see how you can blame the author.

But this thread is a good reality check, particularly for those students that get excited when their online poker hero makes a cutting edge manual. Just make sure you actually are going to utilize it before you purchase it.

Very Well Said.

I have great respect for your posts around here. I also can appreciate what you are saying but most of the e-book authors know that many of the people buying the book are not going to work at the material. Yet these books are promoted as the magic bullet to transform a losing player into an online star and are priced as such. That is my issue.

Because of the price, many people have buyers remorse like the OP. I think if they paid a $100 bucks for the e-book they would not look back question the investment. But if you dumped a couple grand into one of these gems you probably feel different. That's the rub. If you have something special to say and you are successful you feel as the author you should get top dollar. But few people who ever wrote books on other topics did so to squeeze out max profit from each unit as seems to have happened here.

I have posted a ton on this in Books and Publications so I am not going to rehash everything here. Bottom line I still feel many of the books are plain and simple cash in on your hero status publications.

Actually stealing material doesn't work (deleted user post).

If you steal something, the price usually goes up to incorporate the theft rate into it.

If you refuse to purchase something, the demand is weakened and the price may go down.

*I may be wrong* but it makes sense, though I have not had my coffee yet.

I understand your view.

You're probably right too. I haven't read any of the "pricey" ebooks out there yet, I don't really play the games they are most applicable to, so it's not an investment I would really consider.

It's not too gross to think about spending $400 on a book when you start to realize how much some of the books they require you to buy for college are. If you want to talk about a nice racket, colleges run one right there.

In the end people really just need to be smarter. I'm sure 90% of people that buy these premium books actually beat the games. They need to exercise better judgment. We can't create a cap on the price of a book to sell. We can't tell people not to share knowledge. People overcharge for poker coaching, for restaurants, for clothing. The best thing you can do is educate them. If something truly malicious is going on, that's one thing, but from what I can tell the people writing these eBooks do a good enough job to where hard working buyers actually get a solid return out of it. I don't think the book authors are using any shady practice or deceit either.

I mean, what do you tell your friend that just gave the guy with no shoes and torn up wrists $5 to take the bus home because he lost his wallet? He just bought some heroin for somebody.

Contrary to posts above, I assume that most buyers will work hard on learning what an ebook has to offer. My feeling is that there may not be enough to work with, especially over time. LearnedFromTV's plo book sounds cool in the sense that it is information rich material that someone could spend months and months developing their own poker schema from. But then again, it is easy to hit a wall with these things without guidance. So, how about it, giants of NL? Poker education that is more scalable than one-to-one coaching, more durable than a schema that works in some games at some point in time, more information rich than a sweat video and with more guidance than a statistical information dump?

reverie,

Do you have something in mind?

Just a sketch. An information rich course in holdem, basically. I imagine you could create something pretty special along these lines with collaborators. Whether you would want to is another question.

wonder if anyone is planning something like this...

reading a book is one thing

learning from a book is another thing

consistently applying what you learned at the poker table is an entirely different thing

poker books like any course of study gives you what you put into it

Personally, regarding those ebooks I am more concern about the "mass distribution" of them than their price. If the author feel that the ebook is worth 1K no problem with that but I feel that it's pretty much a huge slap in the face for his buyers to see that a lot of them are out there for free on torrents.. Since you sold your book for soooo much you should work really hard to be sure that your stuff don't sort out on torrents (& I am not only talking about drm_lol here) or ebay and put pressure to have them removed when it happens. You should check this out regularly or at least have someone to do so.

Just my 2c

btw, don't even think about PMing me for links (except if you are the author)

If multi Billion dollar industries like the film and music ones are unable to protect their product ,then a poker player/author isn't going to be able to protect theirs either.

Once it gets outside of the original purchasers nothing is going to stop it spreading.

I would tell anyone looking to improve to only start with cheap stuff (like videos) and only move to really expensive stuff (like ebooks and coaching) if youve hit some sort of glass ceiling in your playing ability (this has only happened once in my poker career and thats when I hired a coach). I really think 95% of the time the videos are enough.

Personally I have also never really liked any ebook ive seen, but maybe it just isnt the way I learn best, and works for others.. who knows

I've been using my experience in education and my coaching with students to develop something very similar, and it's way harder than I thought it'd be. Video training and sweat sessions are definitely not the way to go, you really need to approach it with a context based, problem solving mind set that uses theory, methodology and tools in an interactive multi-media setting, but it's really hard to organize in any cost-efficient manner. Essentially, combine Hold'em Manager, Poker Stove, Videos and Articles into an inter-active, multi-media software with decision trees like chessmaster, and you've got yourself a product that breaks a lot of ground while being infinitely expandable with new videos, articles and forum access etc.

Actually, if anybody is interested in developing this with me I'm totally open to PMs.

Yeah, looks like we think similarly about it. A lot of value would be in the open-ended and participatory nature of the course.

Films and music are everywhere on the internet.. You are talking about hundred of links & sites while for ebooks it's only a couple of links.

You can't stop it at 100% but for such a limited distribution it's pretty manageable imo

You often find that the people that spend the time looking for and stealing material via torrents are the same guys that won't get everything out of the eBook (or other stolen material).

It's possible that something is of good value but is still priced too high, but that's not the justification that you see people using who take these things (it's not a legitimate justification for stealing it anyways).

"Previewing" "broke college kid" "omg it's a ripoff" "it's not that good" are all the excuses I hear. It comes down to a lack of respect and hard work though. If you work hard in poker, you'll easily make enough to afford almost any product you wish. If you have respect for other people's hard work, you won't even consider stealing an option. It's easier to steal from people you don't have to face, or that don't even live in your same country, I suppose. It gives the thief enough "brass" to actually commit the crime. They often like to cite that "this guy has an ebook he sells for $500, loool what a dick, I'll gladly download this torrent" when the only reason they are downloading the torrent is in hopes of making thousands of more dollars playing poker. In reality, for the level of skill they are at, there is likely a ton of more relevant, free material available for them that can help them get to the next level, rather than trying to jump ahead without learning the proper skills and also stealing somebody's product.

1.) Online pirates are notorious hoarders. They tend to collect far more content than they can actually use. So they may be thrilled to have a copy of that $3,000 PDF on California Lowball, they are not likely to read it.

2.) Didn't the Tribeca Tables version of Doyle's Room post the NL section of SuperSystem online? I doubt it hurt sales.

Posting a section of a book is a standard way to increase potential sales. People read a bit, like what they read and decide to buy the book that they may not have bought otherwise.

It's akin to people handing out samples at a grocery store. Stealing the bottle of ketchup, probably is going to have a net negative effect on the grocery store, I would guess.

Not to say they never hand out free products. I think it's an easy issue, don't take what is not your's

The debate about various ways to give away free products that actually has a net positive impact on a business is interesting to talk about though. You could argue that DC has been the pioneer of that in the training site world.

Mainstream publishing often gets people to write books so they can sell consulting, public speaking, seminars, etc. People often write books as a loss leader to support their other interests.

Ryan Fee has certainly been able to profit from his free e-book, which is better than some that cost money.

That's another good point.

I'm not arguing with you by the way, I agree with pretty much everything that you are saying.

I just don't see theft as a good option regardless. It's fine to point to free things (not you, generally speaking) as good examples of giving away a product while still allowing yourself to make money.

However, it's very unfair to tell somebody "well, you have to find a way to profit by giving a product away for free or people will have a right to steal it."

I prefer to support the concept of telling people what they can and cannot do when they are being malicious, this is a case where the free market with only criminal oversight (scams, false advertisement, theft, etc.) is needed imo.

I think it might work like this in a supermarket, not when boxes of desired goodies are left unattended in the street.