The textbook's chapters are bootable

A technical course ships as video of someone else's terminal. The learner who joins at chapter seven either replays six chapters of setup or copies along without understanding.

Author the course as a sequence of snapshots instead. Finish writing chapter three, snapshot the machine as chapter three leaves it; that snapshot is the artifact you sell. A buyer opens any chapter and receives a clone of its exact state: the database seeded, the bug planted, the half-built app waiting at the line the text discusses. Skipping ahead is legitimate; the machine arrives caught up.

A thousand learners are a thousand copy-on-write clones of one shelf of states, on boxes whose rent doesn't care.