Doc authors who focus on making reusable templates have expressed a desire for the ability to charge a fee for copying their document. Currently the only builtin ability for revenue for doc authors is the Coda affiliate system, however this only rewards new-signups and is not reciprocal of template copy value, which can be multitudes depending on how many templates a maker wishes to charge for.
Hi Benjamin,
Thanks for raising this. I will add a few use cases below. And I appreciate that providing this functionality will be a major effort, maybe it can be rolled out in phases.
The first example is to simply provide access to a document for reading purposes.
An example:
This scenario is simply information that people would pay a fee for. Once-off if the data is not updated, a subscription if the information in the doc will be updated.
This kind of document cannot be copied.
A further scenario is where a copy of the document is made for use by a customer.
For Example:
In this scenario, there will be a monthly subscription for each copy of the document. In practical terms: The SAP Implementation consulting house will create a copy for each implementation that they do. The copy will include all the SAP standard information from the master SAP KAT. During the implementation, customer specific data will be added. Any changes to the SAP generic data must be (optionally) synced back from the customer copy to the main SAP KAT doc. There will be limited changes to the functionality of the doc, and there will be a small number of copies of the document.
In the case that the customer is allowed to make a copy of the doc in their own workspace, they must be prohibited from making further copies of the doc.
Scenario 3.
For example:
This is very similar to the first scenario, but the customer needs to be able to make copies of the formula examples in the document, but not copy the document as a whole.
Scenario 4.
Example: Main Doc
Example: Cross doc
In this scenario, the doc contains course materials, to which customers have access to. Part of the course material is a list of possible action items. For a subscription fee, the customer also gets access to a cross doc with the action items. In the cross doc they can then use a habit tracker to start implementing the action items as suggested in the seminar/ course. I envisage that there will later be multiple courses in the doc, each with their own action items.
The customer will pay a subscription fee for each course that is synced to the cross doc. Again, there will not be a large amount of functionality changes, the focus is on data changes.
Scenario 5
Example doc (in very early stage of development.)
This is a follow on to the first document. In this document the theory in the Monie Orchards financial information is applied in a doc that will allow a customer to capture their financial information, and interrogate the data to see what will happen when he dies on a specific date, becomes unemployed, etc.
In this scenario, the data will be captured by the customer in his copy of the doc, for which he pays a subscription fee. There will be a continuous update of the functionality of the document, which needs to be copied down to the copy of each owner.
Scenario 6
Example doc:
I am still trying to figure out exactly how to do this document. The basic idea is that a customer subscribes to a basic version of the document, with a certain set of features. The customer can then unlock additional features as his needs develop from the full feature set of the document.
For example, they might start with a simple todo list, with the ability to schedule meetings, and record to-dos from those meetings, and emailing minutes of those meetings.
Later they might decide to make use of the project features to enable them to group to-do’s in a meaningful way. And to make use of the ability to copy a standard set of todos from a template into projects that follow the same structure.
It’s just another ramble. 
Rambling Pete