[HN Gopher] Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)
Author : luu
Score : 340 points
Date : 2020-04-26 07:42 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.plover.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.plover.com)
| lazyant wrote:
| For ebooks only, there are options to charge and make them
| available for free as well.
|
| One option is honor system: pay if you can, see for ex
| https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1254396387703361536 .
|
| Another option is where people can buy the book and pay for other
| people as well.
| hn_check wrote:
| This is one of those articles that is self-promotion disguised as
| a "lesson" of some sort, and it gets upvoted by loads of people
| who then want to engage in their own self-promotion.
|
| "Oh yes, this is true..my experiencing with my book [link]"...
|
| Tech/software dev books make extremely little money. The #1
| reason people write such books -- knowing that they're unlikely
| to see much more than a coffee or two of proceeds -- is for
| reputation/career development. Getting a book "published", even
| through actual publishing houses, is the easiest part of the
| process: Agile printing and the absence of editorial standards
| makes it a close to riskless process for them.
| mjd wrote:
| I hope that someday you discover that people sometimes do
| things for reasons other than "self-promotion".
| hn_check wrote:
| Quaint. Maybe you can write a blog post detailing how
| idealized of a human being you are, teaching us that self-
| promotion is a myth? Offer it to publishers and get amazed
| when everyone will `publish' anything, showing how truly
| remarkable you are.
|
| Self-promotion is the vehicle that drives a good percentage
| of HN content. And that's okay and is just a reality of life
| as we all claw and scramble for our place in the hierarchy.
| But far too often it has dishonest packaging, with hilarious
| lead-ins like "people often ask me" (no they don't) and
| wrapping some self-aggrandizing prattle as if it's
| instructive for others.
|
| It gets called out on most other venues. HN is a particularly
| gullible, complicit crowd (loads of low level developers who
| desperately want to feel like they're in the big boy club,
| wearing big boy pants) so it plays well here. Day after day.
|
| It's pretty shameless.
| hn_check wrote:
| The fact that my other comment -- which is completely true,
| btw -- was flagged while the insipid, patronizing comment
| above isn't: Beautiful, classic Hacker News.
|
| I'd never leave this place, though. Where else am I going to
| read AGW denial or see hilariously tenuous attempts at
| defending whatever insipid thing the POTUS said recently.
| This place has more far-right anti-science imbeciles than
| InfoWars.
|
| When HN puts its collective genius together and repeatedly
| gives their take on SARS-CoV-2, it truly is a sight to see. I
| mean, it's ignorant nonsense by a bunch of over-confident
| clowns who think that the accomplishment of throwing a shitty
| webpage together makes them a Great Thinker. It's stupid as
| hell, but also incredibly funny.
|
| Just earlier today some fans asked me, "hn_check, being so
| handsome and so gloriously smart, not to mention so well
| hung, how do you tolerate such antics?" It isn't easy to
| answer, though I received sight-unseen contracts from six
| major publishers to tell my tale. I'm above that, though.
| Truly, a selfless, zero-self-promotion genius.
| johnr2 wrote:
| > Truly, a selfless, zero-self-promotion genius.
|
| Impressive bot. I wonder who programmed it.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Adding a personal connection to the topic is true of almost all
| HN threads. Most of the time I find it interesting and read
| through the comments, but sometimes it irritates me as I'm only
| interested in the topic itself, in which case I skip the
| comments but am thankful the article made the front page.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I used to make my eBooks available for free download on my web
| site (and still do for my older books) but in the last few years
| I have sold my books (on leanpub) with a Creative Commons Share
| and Share Alike, No commercial Derivatives License. I also try to
| "seed" my books by giving copies away. In the prefaces, I make it
| clear that the eBooks can be shared.
|
| I think this is a good compromise since I earn a little 'walking
| around money' and my stuff gets fairly widely read.
|
| The super-power advantage of writing books is getting to meet
| interesting people and expand networking.
| kragen wrote:
| If you remove the no-derivatives clause it becomes legal for
| people to translate them into other languages.
| insulanian wrote:
| "Free stuff sells well!"
|
| -- I can't remember where I've read it.
| [deleted]
| bachmeier wrote:
| Mark Twain
| marijn wrote:
| This aligns with my experience with
| https://eloquentjavascript.net, except that I put it online
| before publishing on paper, and my hunch is that it wouldn't have
| reached anywhere near the level of fame (and thus sales) it did
| if it hadn't been available online.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| well, regardless of whether or not that is true (i genuinely
| hope it is-- for your sake and the world's) thank you very much
| for the choice that you _did_ make. betting on yourself and
| your work in this way had the nice side effect of making the
| world a better place! :)
| specialist wrote:
| Gorgeous book. You have great typographic esthetic. I like your
| writing voice. Thank you for sharing.
|
| FWIW:
|
| I skimmed to see, but did not find, if you specify the target
| JavaScript version and coding style.
|
| I can't keep up with the rapid change in JS Universe. And I
| have absolutely no opinions. I just want someone to declare
| their preferred idiom and stick to it. House rules for
| objectness, for error handling, for concurrency, for modules,
| and so forth.
|
| So a project would declare "ES2015, Eloquent JavaScript 3rd
| Edition, eslint w/ Twitter rules 2018-09-01".
|
| Thanks for listening.
| notechback wrote:
| A tin, suggestion: I can't see anywhere on the page the year of
| finalisation/publication. Might be helpful to add as tech books
| are so quickly outdated :-)
| aswanson wrote:
| Your book is excellent. Downloading and reading it made me feel
| incredibly guilty for not paying for it, so I bought a hard
| copy.
| billpollock wrote:
| You're probably right.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _wouldn 't have reached anywhere near the level of fame (and
| thus sales)_
|
| Cory Doctorow in 2008:
|
| > _For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem
| isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this
| great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book
| today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not
| because someone gave them a free copy._
|
| * https://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/
|
| Now that he's more established and has a fan base it may be
| less applicable (just like Stephen King may not want to give
| away his stuff), but if anyone is starting out, getting readers
| is a challenge in the first place.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Here's how I buy most technical books: I get a pirated copy,as
| those are available for 99% of the books.Skim it to see if it's
| any good at all and then I go on Amazon and buy it. With your
| book, I did the same, except that I didn't need to get a
| pirated copy- I went to the book's website. It's pointless for
| publishers not to release digital versions,as any book can and
| will digitised in a matter of hours and available for anyone to
| download. By the way,your book is excellent.Any plans to
| publish more books?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I do this same thing. Emphasis is on skim. I never read a
| pirated book; if it isn't worth owning, it isn't worth my
| limited reading time.
|
| Back when physical book stores existed, this is how I would
| buy books. I would go in and skim books and I would buy the
| ones I was interested in. It is nearly impossible to do this
| now as the remaining physical book stores can't carry all the
| books I'd like to skim and potentially buy.
| diggan wrote:
| Agree. I feel there are two main audiences for technical
| books. Those who are interested in the subject and might have
| a career in/close to it in the future, and those who are
| interested in the subject and already work with it/similar
| things.
|
| The first group won't be able to afford the book right now,
| but if you can still manage to give them the knowledge, they
| won't forget about it, and might come back to buy the book
| when they can afford it. I certainly did this for many books
| that been available for free, but as soon as I could, wanted
| to support the author. Same goes for Open Source software
| with donation jars.
|
| The second group just want to be able to review something
| before they buy it, and the purchase is still not just about
| getting the content, but supporting the person creating the
| content.
|
| So by having it available for free online, you can easier
| reach both these groups, as otherwise you mainly get the
| second one (and pirate copies with varying degree of quality
| all over the place)
| enitihas wrote:
| > Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.
|
| But no open source software is being sustainably developed
| on contributions form donation jars. There might be 1-2
| exceptions, but most open source projects make pennies from
| donations.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The Blender open source project was started entirely from
| voluntary donations, and it gets very sizeable
| contributions to this day. The same applies to many other
| major projects. Even development of the Linux kernel
| itself and closely-related projects is largely funded via
| voluntary contributions to the Linux Foundation.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Even development of the Linux kernel itself and closely-
| related projects is largely funded via voluntary
| contributions to the Linux Foundation.
|
| Development of the Linux kernel is largely funded by
| companies paying for developers to work on it (and by
| paying membership fees to the Linux Foundation to cover
| professional LF salaries like Linus').
| diggan wrote:
| I think the same goes for technical books. I don't have
| any source available for this but remember reading blog
| posts from authors that wrote; compared to the time spent
| on writing a book, the earnings doesn't justify writing
| the book for just the income. Rather, you do it for all
| the side-effects (sans income) of writing a book,
| exposure and the alike.
|
| Not sure there are people who survive on only writing
| technical books, usually they have another job and do the
| book on the side of other things. At least as far as I
| can gather.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think that's correct about technical books for the most
| part. Certainly the case with me. Writing the books has
| been very valuable career-wise. But the money is trivial.
|
| The difference with open source projects is that there
| are a lot of project leaders who in my experience get
| sucked into an ongoing full-time role for which they
| receive very little money. Such a role can lead to a good
| job of course. But my sense is that there are more people
| doing a full-timeish largely unpaid gig writing
| software/managing a project than in the case of technical
| books--which people are more likely to do as a one-off
| project that they may even do partly on work time.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| How about Google Books? Does that not obviate the need for
| outright piracy?
| [deleted]
| franze wrote:
| my book[1] is
|
| 1) beautiful print book - paid and giveaway
|
| 2) paid kindle on amazon
|
| 3) DRM free epub, pdf, mobi on gumroad - paid and free
|
| there is a reason for all three cases.
|
| my general agenda is that I wrote the book to a) improve the
| status quo of the topic (SEO) as it's a horrible b#lls#it driven
| discepline. and b) to reach new clients. these were the driving
| factors. the money return from the book is not a main motivator,
| for this it is too niche, as it targets developers who don't want
| to suffer under SEO anymore.
|
| ad 1)
|
| so I created a print book that gets displayed in the offices, so
| that people talk about it, easily share and borrow it. it is a
| paid product so that it percieved to have inherent value. also I
| don't want to make a loss with print. but I also give it away at
| workshops so that it spreads wildely. additonal I hope that in
| the future I can start from a higher knowledge level and that the
| knowledge stays longer in the organization.
|
| ad 2)
|
| the kindle store is a strong channel in its own. you can not set
| the price to zero, so it costs something. even if I promore the
| free DRM version (see 3) people download it via the kindle store,
| as it is easier.
|
| ad 3)
|
| DRM free on gumroad. free because DRM sucks. has a pricteag as if
| it's free($) onlye people might not see it as valueable. free
| with vouchers, as I regularly promote it via all kind of events.
|
| I set it to 0 for some time in general on gumroad, there was no
| positive uplift in the long term, so I use promotion vouchers.
|
| [1] the book is
| https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding-seo,
| gumroad is https://gumroad.com/l/understanding-seo/hacker-news
| [with 100% voucher for hacker-news], Kindle is
| https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-SEO-Systematic-Approach... 5
| stars, 16 reviews
| econcon wrote:
| I never pay for any book even tho I am high net worth, I always
| downloaded books from libgen.
|
| Most of the books are not worth it
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| Even if _most_ books aren 't worth it, shouldn't you still pay
| for the handful that are?
| andai wrote:
| Sometimes I worry if Karma exists (or may one day be
| implemented by the AI that grows out of internet surveillance)
| and I will be forced to pay back everything I have pirated,
| that it would take me many lifetimes to do so.
| thulecitizen wrote:
| > I will be forced to pay back everything I have pirated
|
| There's nothing to 'pay back'. Rentier capitalism has us
| convinced copying is theft, but only because the propertied
| classes have created artificial scarcity and high
| exploitative rents. [1] After we move to Commons based peer
| production, we will have a new reality, and artificial
| scarcity will be seen for what it is: domination.
|
| [1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-
| corru...
| gambiting wrote:
| That's such a weird position to take. It's both weird that
| you'd do it in the first place, and also weird that you think
| it's something worth bragging about on the internet.
| harryf wrote:
| Higher Order Perl is one of the most enjoyable books I ever read
| on programming for being both a great intro to functional
| programming and also highly pragmatic in application of FP.
|
| Sadly it's hard to recommend because prejudice against Perl
| lsiebert wrote:
| I like to tell people that Perl is like shell scripting but
| with actual package management, proper data structures and flow
| control, easy testing, and a thoughtful and supportive
| community.
|
| I mean, that's like saying C is good for embedded devices, true
| but definitely not the whole story. But it's been enough to get
| a few people to try it.
| munificent wrote:
| In this post and most of the comments here, people assume you
| have a binary choice:
|
| 1. You can put your book online for free and sacrifice extrinsic
| reward (money) for greater intrinsic reward (popularity, impact
| on the world).
|
| 2. You can maximize your financial income by only selling the
| book.
|
| I _thought_ I was making that choice when I decided to put "Game
| Programming Patterns" online for free, but that's not actually
| how it turned out. I have made much more money from the book than
| I would have if I'd gone with a traditional publisher and not put
| the book online for free. The model I have now is something like
| the classic marketing funnel. To make the most money from a
| thing, you need to have as many people go through this series of
| steps as possible:
|
| 1. Know that the product exists.
|
| 2. Decide to want it.
|
| 3. Be _just_ willing to pay the price to acquire it. (Anything
| less and you 're leaving money on the table.)
|
| 4. Keep as much of that money for yourself as possible. (In other
| words, reduce costs.)
|
| For technical books, most people don't get past step 1. Putting
| the book online _dramatically_ improves that. Of the people who
| do, many stop at step 2. There are so many articles out there, it
| 's easy to convince yourself you don't need a acquire a whole
| book. Again, putting the book online helps: you can try before
| you buy.
|
| Step 3 is the interesting one. Putting the book online _for free_
| obviously leaves, like, _all_ money on the table. But what I have
| found is that there a self-selected market segmentation seems to
| come into play. Many people do read the book for free, but some
| choose to pay anyway.
|
| Step 4 is the dirty secret of the big technical book publishers.
| They take an embarrassingly large chunk of each sale. That could
| maybe be justified in the old days of publishing when you needed
| to run a whole printing press and maintain relationships with
| independent book publishers and all that. But, frankly, they do
| not do enough to justify how much they take. Self-publishing
| fixes that, at the expense of having to do more of the work and
| management yourself. I had to find a freelance copy editor, and
| typeset and design the cover. But I effectively "got paid" to do
| that work at a much better rate than it would have cost me to
| "pay" a publisher to do that by giving them the lion's share of
| each sale.
|
| I don't want to generalize too much from my one single data
| point, but it seemed that for me, the increased widening of the
| first two steps and the greater share at step 4 more than
| compensated for the money left on the table for some readers at
| step 3. It was a clear enough signal that I'm taking the same
| approach with my second book. And, equally importantly, I really
| liked the subjective experience of it being _my_ book and being
| able to put it out into the world exactly the way I wanted to.
| Veera_Sivarajan wrote:
| I'm a student and I always scout for books online. I promise
| myself that, if the book helps me, I'll buy a copy of it in the
| future.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I am not a fan of book DRM. I have one reader app that I prefer,
| and want to read everything on it.
|
| I have absolutely no issues with paying for most books;
| especially if they are about my work. I do have an issue with
| "price-gouging" books, though. I think those are usually
| textbooks. The markup on them can be eye-watering, and I give
| them a hard pass.
|
| When I write, I like to make it public and free. I have been
| approached about having my work behind a paywall, and have
| declined. Maybe I'll consider it in the future, but I'm not doing
| it for the money.
|
| As the author of the post mentioned, writing a book is a fraught
| process. It would have to be an Oprah's Book Club special to make
| it truly worth it, monetarily, and that ain't happening with geek
| books.
|
| I do it mainly because I love writing. I've been doing it since I
| was a child. It also helps me to learn, and organize my own
| thoughts.
|
| But that's just me. YMMV
| arkpafisto wrote:
| "... the book was published in 2005, and has been available as a
| free download since 2008"
|
| Actually he didn't follow the advice.
| mjd wrote:
| Yeah, I'm very disorganized. Also, I had a new baby in mid-2004
| and I was really busy for a couple of years.
| zerr wrote:
| Btw, any plans for Raku variant of the book?
| mjd wrote:
| Not a chance.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I thought he implied that the publisher agreed to a free online
| version after a delay of two or three years. (Although I don't
| think he said so directly.)
| mjd wrote:
| The publisher _requested_ that I wait six months, and I
| agreed to that.
| frandroid wrote:
| That is a very fair length... Capture launch sales from the
| most eager readers, then expand the reader base.
| zerr wrote:
| Interesting to see how did it affect the sales.
| roland35 wrote:
| This is great advice, it seems like offering the book for free is
| just as good, if not better, than marketing it with traditional
| advertising!
|
| The author's point that having it online keeps the book relevant
| is also a great point to consider. An online book is now
| integrated with the rest of the internet, instead of being
| firewalled away into obscurity.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Darn, I was hoping to see the code that formatted the beautiful
| final typesetting. The author's workflow ends with HTML, alas.
|
| However, I'm also kind of glad to see that the typesetting was
| done by a real person earning a living as a craftsman designer.
| While I selfishly would love to have access to automated book-
| quality typesetting I'm also in favour of craftsfolk having a
| place in the economy!
| jfk13 wrote:
| Looks like it was done by an agency based in India, using a
| TeX-based system. But most likely with custom in-house macro
| packages etc rather than just off-the-shelf LaTeX or ConTeXt
| styles.
| mjd wrote:
| The interior design and macro packages were done by a
| brilliant Morgan-Kaufmann employee named Julio Esperas. The
| actual typesetting was outsourced to a firm in Bangalore that
| didn't have much experience with TeX and that did a very bad
| job. I had to work hard to correct as many of their mistakes
| as possible.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| In what format did you write the source?
| LukeShu wrote:
| Per https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ he used a modified
| version of the "POD" markup associated with Perl.
| mjd wrote:
| I implemented a simple markup language, "Mod", that was
| similar to the "POD" language used to format the Perl man
| pages. There's a summary here:
|
| https://github.com/mjdominus/mod
|
| The main desideratum was that I should be able to use the
| same sources to generate TeX to send to the compositors,
| HTML for the web version, and a plain text version
| output. (In the end I sent the HTML version to the
| compositors instead.) Also I wanted inline tests, so that
| when the book said "function `foo` returns 7" I could
| have an inline test that would check that automatically.
| I added some features I needed that POD didn't have, like
| a code to generate an index entry. And I fixed some
| things I didn't like about POD.
|
| Markdown hadn't been invented yet or I probably would
| have modified that instead of POD. Pandoc hadn't been
| invented yet or I probably would have used it.
|
| But Mod didn't take long to make, and it worked well
| enough that it didn't get in the way while I wrote a book
| in it.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| There are different types of authors.
|
| For this author, and many others, the book is somewhat of a loss-
| leader of some sort: a form of marketing for a consultant,
| freelancer, aspiring politician, scientist, activist, or similar.
| PhD theses often work like this, too.
|
| In that scenario, the royalty cheque is sometimes nice, but not
| considered necessary. If given a choice between, say, ten people
| reading the book for free versus one person buying it and never
| getting around to reading it, these authors will always chose the
| former.
|
| But there is, quite obviously, a different kind: the professional
| author. GoT wouldn't have happened within George RR Martin's
| lifetime if he had to teach English or run a really strange cult
| on the side to pay rent. Many non-fiction authors fall into the
| same category. James Gleick might be one people here enjoy.
|
| This isn't necessarily a binary distinction. Noam Chomsky,
| Richard Feynman, or Edward Tufte could have all lived quite
| comfortably on just their salary as professors and the occasional
| Nobel prize. But their success as authors drastically increased
| their freedom, possibly allowing them to take risks in their work
| they would have avoided otherwise, like talking truth to NASA
| (and/or capitalism).
|
| As an analogy, consider the not-uncommon offer to work for free
| on someone's (commercial) software project in exchange for
| "exposure". This is more common among designers and musicians
| these days, but used to happen quite frequently to programmers as
| well. It's exactly the same logic, and not always entirely wrong.
| Nonetheless, it has become somewhat of a running joke/faux
| pas/universally recognised sign of a person having no clue of the
| industry and to be avoided.
| virvar wrote:
| I think you have it wrong, there are different types of
| audiences. It's not exactly hard to find a free source for
| learning any tech because there is just so much material out
| there, and in that environment it's often better to get paid by
| people who have liked the work you offered them for free.
|
| I would have never read, or later purchased, the testing goat
| book for Django if it wasn't freely available because I would
| have simply selected another source.
|
| People don't really do that with fiction because there isn't 9
| million different Harry Potters that are all almost equally
| good.
|
| A further benefit of having a lot of people read your tech book
| is that you get more feedback which makes it easier to improve
| it, and a lot of tech books are really rather terrible until
| they've been heavily edited. And unlike fiction there is often
| a correct way to do things with tech.
| svat wrote:
| Related and similar: See also the blog post ("Why Textbooks
| Should Be Free") "The Case for Free Online Books"[1] by Remzi
| Arpaci-Dusseau, professor at Wisconsin and (co-)author of the
| fantastic Operating Systems book "Operating Systems: Three Easy
| Pieces" (http://www.ostep.org/)
|
| [1]: http://from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-case-for-
| fre...
| [deleted]
| fullstop wrote:
| I highly recommend Worm [1], available for free and it's some of
| the best fiction I've read in ages. It's only available online
| and not in any sort of (official) e-book format, although there
| are scrapers which can do that pretty seamlessly. It's a great
| story and I would gladly throw money at the author for an
| official e-book version.
|
| [1] https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
| jessaustin wrote:
| I think that needs a loud "WARNING: RABBIT HOLE" notation.
|
| Wildbow is great at writing, kind of bad at monetization. If he
| sold any merch, his many fans would have bought lots of it. I'd
| love a a hoodie that had "Property of Parahuman Response Team
| ENE: Brockton Bay" on it. Or even just some black sweatpants
| with "VILLAIN" printed down one leg. I've given off and on with
| Patreon, but that is somehow much less compelling.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8692627
| maps7 wrote:
| Does anyone have a list of free programming books?
| asicsp wrote:
| https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/bl...
|
| https://devfreebooks.github.io/
| brogrammer2018 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing
| rikroots wrote:
| The key takeaway from the article (as far as I'm concerned) is
| this:
|
| > "So if you write a book it should not be because you want to
| make a lot of money from it but because you have an idea that you
| want to present to the world. And as an author, you owe it to
| yourself to get your idea in front of as many people as possible.
| By putting the book in your web site, you make it available to
| many people who would not otherwise have access to it: poor
| people, high school students, people in developing countries, and
| so on."
|
| ... Which is why I give all my books away for free[1][2], and
| have been doing so for over 10 years.
|
| [1] Obligatory spam link to my website:
| https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/publications
|
| [2] The fact that there's no money in writing poetry is entirely
| incidental.
| specialist wrote:
| I always thought the free to download strategy would become the
| norm.
|
| Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java was free to download. IIRC, from
| early drafts thru many editions.
|
| Crucially, Eckel built a community. He was great about
| including reader feedback, errata, discussing finer points,
| vetting example code. (Today, authors would probably just host
| on git and accept pull reqs.)
|
| As a result, Thinking in Java became significantly better than
| any other Java book. The easy, safe recommendation.
|
| I probably bought 10+ copies over the years, for self and
| gifts. And it became the default book for workplace study
| groups.
| abnry wrote:
| One of the problems, however, is that charging for a book
| signals its value. Whenever someone is offering something for
| free on their website, assuming I have no prior knowledge of
| the reputation of the author, it is easy to make me think that
| it is free because no one else wants it.
| insideBig3 wrote:
| This is really sad.
|
| I saw a off site PDF was the top result of my book.
|
| So I gave up and gave the book away for free.
|
| Guess I'll be charging money now.
| umvi wrote:
| Why not both? Charge for physical/kindle copies on Amazon,
| give away PDF for free on your personal website.
| abnry wrote:
| This is a good middle ground. Alternatively, you can charge
| an incredibly small amount for the book, like $1. Even
| asking for donations when you download the book suggests
| greater worth, in my mind.
| bor0 wrote:
| This is exactly what I did with my first book. It is
| available for free on Leanpub, but I charge minimum for
| Kindle/print using Amazon KDP.
|
| I just wanted to get my message across and learn something
| on the way. It also sells relatively well, but that is a
| side-effect of my initial intentions :)
| vasili111 wrote:
| I can speak of myself. I think that author is giving away
| ebook for free because his book is so good that when you will
| see ebook you will want to buy it in paper. Paper book is
| more convenient for me than ebook. It is much easier to jump
| back to the other part of the book when needed and make notes
| in paper version than ebook. Yes you can print ebook, but it
| is less convenient to use separate lists than whole book. I
| have many paper books that are available for free in
| internet.
| DrNuke wrote:
| Ebooks can be updated, though, and you can get updates for
| free after you make a single purchase, for example through
| the Kindle platform? It becomes a sort of BaaS or Book-as-
| a-Service, which seems a nice way to accommodate both
| parties.
| Avamander wrote:
| They can also be updated in the sense that they're
| removed from my device. I've had that happen to my apps,
| it happened to people using Microsoft's service, I simply
| can't trust any proprietary software to do the updating
| unfortunately, I'd love to have a few typos fixed in
| 50-year-old books however.
| rikroots wrote:
| > charging for a book signals its value
|
| Evidence is mostly anecdotal (not my anecdotes) but the main
| reasons why people buy a book are:
|
| - they know, know of, or have heard good things about the
| author (author platform)
|
| - the book was recommended to them by a friend, or authority
| they trust
|
| - they have to buy it either for themselves (textbooks,
| reading list, bookclub, etc), or for someone else (gifts)
|
| ... Which indicates (to me) that the price point of the book
| is generally not a high priority on the reader's decision-
| making tree, especially as the majority of books are cheap
| (compared to the costs of other forms of entertainment).
|
| Smashwords (my main distribution channel) currently tells me
| I've given away 3,900 books over the past 360 days. Google
| books generally reports smaller numbers than Smashwords
| (60-70%). Amazon results are less than 100, but then they
| force me to price the books on their platform.
|
| I'm not disputing your point (that my books are so crap I
| have no choice but to give them away). But it doesn't take
| away from the quote I lifted from the article, in my first
| comment: giving books away for free is a good thing if you're
| not in the business of writing books for profit.
| zach_garwood wrote:
| "There ain't no money in poetry / That's what sets the poet
| free." --Guy Clark
| api wrote:
| It must be nice to have a trust fund. /sarcasm
|
| Seriously though... I more and more find these kinds of
| sentiments to be unintentional classism, not to mention being
| massively impractical. It's one thing to churn out a book in
| your spare time, and its quite another to make authorship your
| main focus. To do that requires a way to make a living off it
| unless you are already rich.
| rikroots wrote:
| > It must be nice to have a trust fund. /sarcasm
|
| I'll let you know ... if I ever manage to find and marry a
| trust funded person
|
| > It's one thing to churn out a book in your spare time, and
| its quite another to make authorship your main focus
|
| Agreed. I am a hobbyist author. To pay the rent and put food
| on the table I have to do proper work with wages and stuff.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Can I just say that I find this incredibly cool and inspiring.
| Especially how you fulfilled your ambition and got your degree
| via the OU.
|
| I share your ambition but had to put my OU course on hold when
| I migrated abroad. I hope to one day either finish it or
| restart. Once the kids are a bit older, perhaps.
| ysavir wrote:
| Then why write a book? If there's no inherent reason to bind
| your ideas into a single package (which is done for purposes of
| selling a single item), how do your ideas benefit from having a
| book structure? Why not write and format as blog posts instead?
| Or for poetry, a single entry for each poem?
|
| Why use PDFs instead of a format that allows people to bookmark
| individual pages, and for search engines to index individual
| chapters?
| MaxGabriel wrote:
| A book can be helpful for other reasons. For a programming
| book, beginners especially may benefit from a linear
| structure that covers a predefined amount of content.
|
| For example, you can go from zero rails experience to being
| able to build a site with Michael Hartl's rails book. As a
| reader you can stay focused on the book and roughly assume
| you can understand Chapter 2 with the information from
| Chapter 1.
|
| Conversely, a common complaint about intermediate-level
| Haskell is a lot of it is scattered across blog posts, and is
| difficult for beginners to follow.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Many web based tutorials are structured as well.
| Programming in particular is much better learned from a web
| format rather than PDF. The best tutorials I have seen have
| embedded placed to see and test code. Quickly jump back and
| forth to sections describing fundamentals, etc. A PDF is a
| substandard way to learn about coding imo.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| That is a fair question. My older books, as PDFs are on my
| web site, and my leanpub books are freely readable online.
| So, all these books get indexed by search engines and show up
| in search results.
|
| Also, on average I update my eBooks 2 or 3 times so they are
| hardly static material.
|
| There is something very satisfying about spending 3 or 4
| months putting one's thoughts into an eBook. I have about
| 1300 articles on my blog, but I am sure that by word count,
| my books are much more content than my blog. To be fair,
| blogs are easy to update old articles - as eBooks are easy to
| update.
| rikroots wrote:
| > Then why write a book?
|
| Because it's (mostly) a fun hobby. Writing the novel or poem
| can be great fun and great annoyance both at the same time.
| Self-publishing the book is a whole different sort of
| adventure, but the pleasure of getting a printed copy of my
| words in book format ... it's a special, very happy feeling.
|
| And afterwards? I don't get many reviews of my work, but it's
| always fun to read them - even the more negative ones: it
| demonstrates that my words have reached out to a complete
| stranger and, somehow, affected them in ways that compelled
| them to write and post a review.
|
| > Why not write and format as blog posts instead? Or for
| poetry, a single entry for each poem?
|
| Both are good alternatives. And, yes, I've done (and do) both
| in a variety of online venues. Collaborative writing can also
| be fun.
|
| > Why use PDFs instead of a format that allows people to
| bookmark individual pages, and for search engines to index
| individual chapters?
|
| The online venue I use for self-publishing[1] converts
| manuscripts to .epub, .mobi and .pdf versions - all of which
| can be downloaded from my website. Other self-pub venues
| offer similar services.
|
| [1] Smashwords - https://www.smashwords.com/
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > Then why write a book? If there's no inherent reason to
| bind your ideas into a single package (which is done for
| purposes of selling a single item), how do your ideas benefit
| from having a book structure?
|
| To quote Seth Godin, the book is just the souvenir of the
| idea. And it builds credibility, so you can leverage it for
| consulting or to do public speaking.
| jasonv wrote:
| Research "marketing ladder".
|
| Not too much different than where music and albums are
| today... the money's in touring, performance, etc.
|
| If my favorite bands had to,live off album sales, those bands
| wouldn't exist.
| swayvil wrote:
| srsly. This is the age of blogs and reddit posts. "Book" is
| just one possible shape, and certainly not a universal ideal.
| munificent wrote:
| _> certainly not a universal ideal._
|
| But neither is a blog or reddit post.
|
| I've written two books and read countless others and I
| strongly believe that books are a much better shape for
| doing comprehensive justice to a topic.
|
| I've learned a ton from blogs and random articles, of
| course, but there is nothing quite like the in-depth
| knowledge you get when a single author has chosen to
| organize and write an entire book.
| qqn wrote:
| Yes! Same takeaway, and the main reason I published my thesis
| online first, turning it into a video tutorial to boot:
| https://spmx.ca/trp. Specifically I was frustrated at all the
| sources I had to get behind various kinds of walls, pay- and
| otherwise: https://spmx.ca/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/03/00-headaches.png
|
| Nina Paley (from _Rita Sings the Blues_ ) had a great talk five
| years ago on how restricting information is a form of cultural
| cancer that is very relevant here:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc.
| mjcohen wrote:
| That's "Sita Sings the Blues". And I highly recommend it.
| qqn wrote:
| Thank you : )
| vl wrote:
| Greenspun follows his own advice and published his book online
| for free as well:
|
| http://www.realworlddivorce.com/
| djaychela wrote:
| I have written a book - on music technology, specifically using
| Cubase, but giving a good all-round basis to start understanding
| and creating music using Cubase. It took me a long time to write
| (years of prep work, and then a full year of spare time to
| actually properly write, typeset and proof and self-publish), and
| then it languished as I'd never thought about publicity; it was
| used by students of mine who found it immensely useful, but that
| was pretty much that.
|
| Only a fluke meeting of the book with someone from the software
| house who create the book led to some increased popularity and
| sales, along with incremental improvements in sales from my
| youtube channel [1].
|
| The book is only available in print form, as I've never trusted
| any DRM to be worthwhile, and nearly everyone I know who makes
| music does so with software they haven't paid for. I know this is
| entirely counter to the article and also everyone's experience on
| here, but I'm wondering if this is a little different as there
| aren't consultancies etc in the music tech segment. The most
| you'll get from someone who has read your book is a few hours'
| work (at normal rates) either classroom teaching, or one-to-one
| online.
|
| At the current time (as nearly everything I normally do is face-
| to-face), the sales from the book are the only income I have;
| it's not a lot, but last month's sales were about half the
| baseline I need to pay my bills, so I can't complain. I know I
| could be completely wrong about this, but I can't imagine that
| giving it away would do anything other than decimate this income.
|
| [0] - http://tinyurl.com/cubasebookamazon
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/c/musictechtuition
| notRobot wrote:
| Article is from '14.
| DrNuke wrote:
| It makes sense for authors if they get an increment in status and
| different leads, say: a number of sponsored appearances, a
| promotion at work, etc. Generally speaking and in most cases,
| though, it is just free work for the world, which is good at
| large and yet unsustainable as a business model?
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Technical writing is almost never about revenue: there are very
| very few authors,who could live off writing about computer
| related subjects.Most of the revenue comes from alternative
| sources, such as consulting, conferences,maybe even some online
| courses and etc.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Just to add some background. My lad has just started a Udemy
| online course in Unity/C#. From the number of course
| completions and the price the 2 authors appear to have taken
| ~$10M for what amounts to, it seems, a relatively straight
| forward course. (I'm not saying it wasn't hard work setting
| up, but it seems like less work than a year's regular
| teaching.)
| rpeden wrote:
| With Udemy, keep in mind that most people will have
| purchased the course for about $10, and not whatever shows
| up as the list price.
|
| That doesn't mean the course creators aren't still doing
| well. Just that there's almost always some kind of '90%
| off' sale or promotion available. So I find the list prices
| for courses on there to be mildly dishonest because hardly
| anybody pays anywhere near that price.
|
| I don't let that stop me from buying courses via Udemy
| because I've been very happy with the quality of what I've
| gotten so far.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, we bought at discount and IIRC I assumed 80% did, it
| was a very popular course (I'd be surprised, given the
| figures were correct and the course wasn't free at any
| point, if I'd been more than one order of magnitude out
| -- which makes it still massively more financially
| rewarding than direct teaching: which was my point).
| ghaff wrote:
| >That doesn't mean the course creators aren't still doing
| well.
|
| There's almost certainly a power law effect. I'm sure a
| (small) subset of people who do
| training/consulting/writing/instruction who have managed
| to build mostly fairly small-scale but very respectable
| businesses. The nice thing about video training course is
| that they're probably a better way for a solo
| practitioner to scale than most other things out there.
| Assuming they have the skillsets/talent for it of course.
| asicsp wrote:
| I wish that weren't the case. A good book can help millions
| and I feel we'd get more good books if authors were paid
| well. Writing a book isn't an easy task and it can take years
| to write.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| On the other hand, I'd much rather read a technical book
| written by an expert on the topic than an professional
| writer.
| diggan wrote:
| "Clojure For The Brave and True" is also another book who's
| author explicitly chose their publisher (No Starch) because they
| could also publish the book for free on their website. Not only
| is it free but also amazing book, one of the most enjoyable books
| I've read about programming overall and also made me dive into
| the Clojure rabbit hole that I'm now lucky to work professionally
| with during my day job. https://www.braveclojure.com/clojure-for-
| the-brave-and-true/
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The Rust Programming Language is, in part, also with No Starch
| for this reason.
| Poems wrote:
| This looks really good. I'm looking to dive in to Clojure.
|
| Do you recommend my first book be something like this, or
| something more "traditional", like O'Reilly's "Living Clojure"
| or "Clojure"?
| nonrecursive wrote:
| thank you for the kind words :)
| asicsp wrote:
| Similarly, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python [0] (No
| Starch) and Think Python [1] (Green Tea Press)
|
| [0] https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
|
| [1] https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/
| docPangloss wrote:
| I, too, can vouch for Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
| -- one of the first resources I used to learn a bit of Python
| since I wanted hands-on, practical lessons. I'll check out
| Think Python as well.
| asicsp wrote:
| There's an interactive version as well, with changes
|
| https://runestone.academy/runestone/books/published/thinkcs
| p...
| CorbenDallas wrote:
| Makes sense, but it's still exclusively up to author to decide if
| he wants to have his work available for free or not.
| falcor84 wrote:
| That's a nice sentiment, but the reality is that every good
| book will be scanned, OCR'd and put online by sometime almost
| immediately. Whether the author may like it or not, these are
| just the facts of life in the digital world. The faster one
| embraces it, the less heartache.
| DanBC wrote:
| Last time I looked this book was not available as a pirate
| version anywhere. Has that changed? Pozner and Dodd _Cross-
| Examination Science and Techniques_.
|
| Here's a review:
| https://barristerblogger.com/2019/05/16/pozner-dodd-cross-
| ex...
| jessaustin wrote:
| 1) limited general interest
|
| 2) when selecting IP to copy and distribute, that of
| tenacious litigators must be close to the bottom of the
| list
| CorbenDallas wrote:
| Yes, reality is harsh, people like free stuff and don't mind
| to steal if punishment is unlikely, but that doesn't change
| the fact that one's work is one's private property and it's
| up to one to decide its fate.
| zerr wrote:
| Nowadays books get leaked directly from the publisher, no
| need to OCR.
| perpetualpatzer wrote:
| More typically, broken drm on digital editions, but yes.
| It's pervasive and typically doesn't require scanning.
| Fragoel2 wrote:
| The author has a point but I also believe that it exceptional
| longevity also comes from the fact not many authors are writing
| books for Perl. More popular languages, like Java, JavaScript or
| Python have a lot more competition going on.
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