I've been meaning to write about 37 Signal's latest book, Getting Real, for a while now. It's being discussed in a number of places as a prime example of why traditional publishing deals should be heading out the door. I agree with some of these public sentiments, but there are a few critical points people seem to be missing.

First of all, what is this book? According to their site:

Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37 Signals. The book is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view and unconventional approaches to software design. This is not a technical book or a design tutorial; it's a book of ideas.

The numbers: The book sells for $19. It's packaged in PDF form and distributed via download from their website. In this format, direct distribution from writer to consumer becomes trivial and basically free (it's a small, mainly text-based PDF so bandwidth is not an issue). And since 37 Signals handled the writing, design, "packaging" and production, 100% of every sale goes directly into their pockets.

According to their blog, they sold 1,750 copies in the first 24 hours. Which works out to about $33,250 — a sequence of numbers any publisher would love to have in their books. Even the 1,750 copies is impressive — something like 98% of all books published don't break the 1,000 sales mark.

I think it's wonderful that 37 Signals clearly did the right thing for this project — subvert the mainstream publishing routes and push the product out on their own. There are a couple of reasons why this worked particularly well for the Getting Real book but perhaps wouldn't work as well (yet) for a more traditional novel. Getting Real is structured as a manifesto of sorts — built to be read quickly and intensely, to have with you for power-reading on a train (via PDA) or to tear through during a weekend afternoon. It's not meant to be a leisurely cafe read. It's written to engage the reader and get them pumped up to start, one assumes, Getting Real and writing simple, useful applications. But all of this is tangential to the real reason this project did so well: They have 20,880 subscribers to their blog as of March 26. That's 20,000+ opt-in *regular* readers of their material. Add to that the thousands — if not tens of thousands — who read the blog without subscription, and the big picture begins to emerge: 37 Signals has a following of over 30,000 people actively interested in what they're saying. And Getting Real is a compendium of their hitherto blog-bound thoughts.