Ask HN: Publishing a copyleft book

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10123658

by Schiphol • 11 years ago

7 2 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I plan to spend much of the coming academic year writing a book "out in the open": sources under version control, hosted in a public repo, under a copyleft license. But I am also an untenured researcher, and need to build up my publication record, so I'd like to secure a contract with a conventional academic publisher for the hardcopy format. In the humanities, writing and publishing books this way is not at all common, so I would appreciate any pointers to the usual or most effective roadmap:

Should I approach a publishing house first with the idea? Does making the book copyleft put off publishing houses? Other gotchas I should bear in mind?

teachrdan• 11 years ago

Different circumstance, but I self-published my education book under the Creative Commons sharealike-attribution license, and that actually helped me get the next edition published by an established education publisher, Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley & Sons.

I don't know about strict academic publishers. But everyone else is broke. If you present them something finished, something that looks like a real book, that may well help you get published. Just make sure there's a clause in your contract that acknowledges the existence of your copyleft book and makes clear that that does not affect your deal with them whatsoever.

signaler• 11 years ago

You should transcend all notions of 'copy' in the first place. All licensing has to do with some form of restriction on the reproduction, even if the terms are very liberal, like Creative Commons. A friend once told me the best way to get people to read your book is to leave copies of it lying around in public places, with no mention of licensing, or other restrictions on who else should read it. Information wants to be free (or expensive depending on whether you build in business logic).

Ask HN: Publishing a copyleft book

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