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The worlds of publishing and music education have changed drastically since I wrote The Tomás Cruz Conga Method in 2004, published by Mel Bay and sold on amazon.com and in traditional music stores. As of this writing, in late 2009, further changes to the economy, the marketplace and technology are coming at an ever-increasing rate.

I have no idea how all of this will sort itself out, so for Beyond Salsa Piano I'm going to pursue a variety of experiments which will hopefully provide some answers for myself and the many talented authors and musicians who read timba.com. If you have ideas or suggestions, you know where to find me!

Hard Copy Books in the Digital Age

Ten years ago, the only way to reach a large audience was, as we did with the Tomás Cruz books, to sign with a large company which had access to the technology to mass-produce books, CDs and DVDs and distribute them to brick and mortar music stores around the world. Two things have changed. First of all, online clearing houses like amazon.com have replaced storefront businesses as the most common way to buy books and records. Second, hard-copy books and CDs themselves are well on their way to extinction. Most people now buy downloadable MP3s instead of CDs. With DVD rental, we've gone from the neighborhood rental outlet to rent-by-mail services such as Netflix, but now it's possible to stream movies on demand and to store large video files on today's massive hard drives. While hard copy books are still dominant, even their marketshare is rapidly eroding under the onslaught of digital book readers such as Amazon's "Kindle", and competing devices from Sony and perhaps Google.

What do today's Cuban music fans and students prefer? I've gotten many requests to print a hard-copy version of my free online book The Roots of Timba, so for the much more hands-on piano series, I decided that a completely digital approach wasn't the best way to go. As a result I'm offering the books in two completely different formats:

• hard-copy from createspace.com - If you want a glossy, professionally printed book to put on your music stand, the amazon.com option is for you. The list price is $20. Note that the same product can also be bought from amazon.com but when you buy it from createspace.com (owned by amazon), the royalty is twice as high for the author, so please buy it at createspace! (Vol. 1) (Vol. 2)
• online, printable PDF from latinpulsemusic.com - If you want to save a lot of money, get the book instantly, and save shipping costs, you can use the latinpulsemusic.com option to print the book on your own home printer for only $9.99.

Audio and Video Files

Most music method books come with an audio CD or video DVD. I've already created the audio files for Beyond Salsa Piano and hope to collaborate with Melón Lewis to produce supplementary video study files as well. The audio files are availabe as downloads only, from latinpulsemusic.com, and also sell for $9.99 per volume. When the video files are done, they will also be download-only and sell for $9.99 per volume.

Depending on your learning style, you may be satisfied with just the book, or just the audio files, which come in fast and slow motion versions with the left and right hands panned hard left and right to fascilitate learning the piano tumbaos by ear if you don't read music or don't like to read music.

As explained, all of this is experimental and all feedback is welcome.