Content Authorship
I am a full time practicing physician, and I am the only content author. I spend roughly 40 hours per month writing content, and have done so for over 20 years. As with medicine in general, the website content is far from static. I log the updates each month here, with a link to the full updated website content. I use the review literature and conferences in primary care and emergency medicine to trigger topic reviews in order to systematically update the content. At most, I'll update only 700-800 of the nearly 7000 topic pages per year, with a plan to systematically update the entire website every 7-8 years.How is Fpnotebook supported financially?
The fpnotebook website since around 2000, has been supported by advertising. The website has enough traffic to warrant its own server at a cost approaching $1000 per month, while software and other fees push my out of pocket expenses over $10,000 per year to run the site. Advertising revenue has been dwindling over time, but it still pays the bills, and allows me to maintain the website at no cost to its users.
The iphone/Android versions of FPnotebook have been built by Atmoapps and include the same content from the fpnotebook website. Atmoapps is a small physician owned company with a very talented group of dedicated developers. They have produced quality applications for many medical publishers including Tarascon and Sanford Guide. This level of quality, application maintenance, support and updates are not free. Advertising on mobile would be intrusive, and therefore the applications are supported by a subscription model.
Why did the Android/Iphone Application Subscription policy change?
Since it was released, the Iphone and Android FPnotebook applications have been subscription products. There has always been a trial period, after which a subscription was required for continued content updates. However, users could still use the applications with the outdated content. In retrospect, allowing continued use of outdated content was a mistake. The fpnotebook website offers a free alternative with identical, updated content (including a free mobile version).
The March 2019 release of the Iphone and Android applications include a note taking feature. Users can add their own personal annotations and images. However, this increased the development and maintenance costs, including the server costs to store this information on behalf of the user.
For these reasons, the Iphone and Android versions of the fpnotebook application will require subscriptions, and trial versions will deactivate after 30 days. For those users who do not wish to pay the roughly $20 per year subscription, I encourage you to use the website, including its mobile version for free and indefinitely.
For those users who continue with the Iphone and Android subscriptions, thank you for supporting my monthly updating of the website content. This is never ending, as is likely your own continuing medical education. Thank you also for supporting the Atmoapps team, in their continued efforts to maintain and improve the mobile fpnotebook application. At roughly $20 per year, we have tried to price the application reasonably and in line with other mobile medical applications that require ongoing content revisions and much less than journal and letter subscriptions.
Contact
Contact information is available on every page of the website, and may be found here.