Hi guys, like some of you I got this email from the SEO Book affiliate program. Makes for interesting reading.

Do you think this is the end of the ebook? and what do you think the motivations here are?

Dear Geoff,

Over the course of the past couple years it became obvious to me that the perceived value of ebooks was dropping, the field of SEO was getting more complex, and many people who purchased my book wanted to be able to interact with me and ask me many questions. This caused me to need to change the SEO Book business model away from selling a downloadable ebook, and toward selling a web based information product backed by a community forum that helped turn it into a service more than a product.

I already have affiliate tracking in place for the new affiliate program. On February 20th at midnight I am going to shift the default affiliate traffic location to pointing at the new landing page instead of the old landing page, as we have no further plans to sell the SEO Book ebook.

If you are a top selling affiliate and would like a free 3 month trial of the new training program please send me an email at seobook@gmail.com.

For your convenience, here is your affiliate ID number, your username, and your password.

Affiliate ID xxxxx
Username xxxxx
Password xxxxxx

Cheers,
Aaron


Sincerely,
Aaron Wall
SeoBook.com

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I got the same email.

I dont think e-books are dead, they are just cheap, nasty and usually filled with hype which you probably already know isnt Aaron's style at all.

Fair play to him and I hope it works out. It must have been **** hard to compete with the $5 e-books flooding the place.

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I thought it was interesting that he was binning the book altogether. If he can succeed in building an online community then that however has some inherent value that may be sold on (if successful).

As far as I remember he was ready to jack it in altogether and only perform private consultation for his clients. I think that was early last year.

I reckon he is going to try to replicate a similar system to that of SEOmoz.

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Getting a life?

Though seriously, I think that he is about to find that people do not scale in the same horizontal manner that eBooks do. Though the web based information product and community might go some of the way towards scaling horizontally, the eBook allows an easier horizontal scaling. It is moving from a product to a service. And it is a tough move.

Regards...jmcc

A lot of non-affiliate SEOs were happy enough to recommend the book, not so sure about the new service though...

[pls delete.. way offtopic!]