Get Your Book, Make It Free

http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/get-your-book-make-it-free/

by arunc • 7 years ago

356 130 7 years ago

realtimerendering.com

LeonB• 7 years ago

This is a good step in making your work live a longer life, and do more to help the world.

Particularly once that first (and likely only) flush of money has come and gone.

AdmiralAsshat3• 7 years ago

Suggestion: Release your book as an EPUB rather than a PDF. PDF has the reputation of being view-able "everywhere", but it's not exactly pleasant to read on anything other than a computer screen or a large tablet.

EPUB's, however, can dynamically reflow the text and resize the font to be readable on your phone, your Kindle, your PC, etc. And they're far easier to cleanly convert to other formats (even PDF, if that's your only option) than the reverse direction.

teekert• 7 years ago

This. I recently subscribed specifically to some Google website, including all my work related info, to get an ebook on the state of Kubernetes. I was looking forward to it... And then they send me a PDF which is completely unreadable on my Kindle and I'm not going to read a whole book on my laptop. I really hate it when people call PDFs ebooks. Sorry :)

ghaff4• 7 years ago

It really depends. Kindles are great if you're flowing a bunch of text. They can work fine with more graphics (although you're mostly back to using a tablet again) but the e-version really needs to be properly designed for it--e.g. avoiding sidebars and that sort of thing. Just a low-effort conversion can look pretty awful.

ZebZ• 7 years ago

Amazon will convert formats for you so that it works on your Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email

vram222• 7 years ago

Have you checked if Calibre or pandoc or any other ebook format conversion tool can get you the format you want? Calibre was mentioned on HN recently (probably earlier too) and pandoc keeps getting mentioned. Both have been around for a while.

coldtea• 7 years ago

Suggestion: Release your book as an EPUB rather than a PDF. PDF has the reputation of being view-able "everywhere", but it's not exactly pleasant to read on anything other than a computer screen or a large tablet.

On the other hand, it respects positioning, fonts, illustrations, and so on -- and is much better printed.

memling• 7 years ago

Release your book as an EPUB rather than a PDF. PDF has the reputation of being view-able "everywhere", but it's not exactly pleasant to read on anything other than a computer screen or a large tablet.

One compromise is to target a reasonable screen size in the PDF layout. Set your margins for a 6" viewable (or whatever you like to optimize for) and you should still get a reasonable experience on a tablet.

umvi2• 7 years ago

I write my books in markdown and use pandoc to generate PDF and EPUB.

alias_neo2• 7 years ago

How does pandoc compare to grip? I often need to render Markdown to PDF and find Grip is _ok_ but not great, and if I'm not mistaken it renders Github-side, where I'd prefer offline.

ultrafilter• 7 years ago

If you're giving the book away, why not release the source (LaTeX, Word, whatever) in addition to your favorite subset of {PDF,EPUB,...}? Then readers who want a different format have a better chance of being able to produce it themselves.

contravariant• 7 years ago

If used well EPUB is suitable as the source (more than Word anyway). It's generally just HTML with some metadata.

I think it is (in theory) even allowed to make an EPUB of LaTeX files, except that EPUB readers aren't required to support LaTeX (you're also allowed to provide both HTML and LaTeX, although the W3C probably expected people to use that part of the standard for audio-books).

AdmiralAsshat3• 7 years ago

Outside of dedicated enthusiasts, I don't think the average reader wants to take the time to "compile" their book.

Most commercial services these days (if my HumbleBundle books from O'Reily are any indication) simply provide pre-compiled editions in EPUB/MOBI/PDF format, as this seems to cover 95% of use cases.

decebalus1• 7 years ago

I agree with you on all accounts. I love epub for these exact reasons. However, Amazon doesn't support it. It's one of the reasons I haven't and I won't buy another Kindle when my current one dies (4 year old and the battery barely lasts 3 days). Was looking after the kobo but I heard mixed reviews about it's reliability so I'll end up reading all my stuff on the ipad.. I hope my eyes will not fight back.

AdmiralAsshat3• 7 years ago

I've had a Kobo Clara HD for about a month, so I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about it.

FWIW, most of my eBook collection was purchased on Amazon before I got the Kobo, and it's been easy enough to download them all from Amazon and run them through Calibre to get them converted into an EPUB or KEPUB (special subset of EPUB that's better optimized for the Kobo) and get them onto the device.

You can go in the reverse direction as well. I regularly grab ebooks from wherever, strip away the DRM if I have to, convert to MOBI, and then email it as an attachment to the my email address associated with various family members' Kindles.

ivan_ah• 7 years ago

If the book contains lots of equations, ePub is not the best. The best thing I've found is https://github.com/softcover/softcover which can generate pretty decent ePub/mobi with math as images, but still not as good as latex-produced PDF.

The problem is, every single .epub reader renders things slightly differently so when you tweak your ePub to make it look good on device A, it ends up looking bad on device B. The fixed layout of PDF is certainly restrictive, but at least it's consistent.

Context: working for past year on producing a decent quality ePub for some equation-heavy books.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

If the book is pure text (like fiction), then sure.

But non-fiction often includes plenty of illustrations, sidebars, images, footnotes, and so on, which while EPUB can handle in theory, often wind up with all sorts of bugs in reality, things being out of order or not making sense or being clipped instead of resized when converting to PDF, etc.

I've found PDF's to be generally more reliable overall, and not too much of a problem on my phone for average-sized book pages -- I just hold my phone in landscape mode and pinch to zoom in enough so the phone doesn't waste space on margins on the sides.

The only PDF's that doesn't work for tend to be full-size textbooks (significantly larger than the average book page), but those are also the ones where layout tends to be the most important and I've had the most disastrous experiences with EPUB. Right now I just don't think it's realistic to read most textbooks on your phone in any format. (Plus you want to highlight, annotate in the margins etc., none of which is great on the phone anyways, but is great with a stylus/pencil on your tablet.)

la_barba• 7 years ago

Can an author typeset their work using the EPUB format?

mkl• 7 years ago

EPUB is an open standard, and many (often free) tools can target it, so yes.

pfranz3• 7 years ago

When I first got into ebooks I tried buying everything in them. It really sucks when you have a reference book at home, but you need it at work. Unfortunately, code formatting is often terrible for ebooks--reflow ruins it. So I tend to prefer the PDF or a hard copy for anything that contains code.

For narrative books I prefer EPUB all the way. Release both if possible!

It also sounds like a lot of books a proofed as a PDF (I hear a surprising amount of publishing is still driven by MS Word). Like the article says, the author may not have a version of the book with proper layout.

OJFord2• 7 years ago

Will there be an EPUB version?
EPUB doesn't let us set a minimum length. EPUB also doesn't have line-folding glyphs. We are unlikely to release an EPUB or MOBI until they offer some way to deal with this problem.
What big tech publishers do to get around this problem is embed low resolution jpegs of the source code in their EPUBs. This is a terrible solution and we will not put something out that does this.
There's an e-reader formatted PDF which, on the 4 or 5 different Kindle models we've tested or seen it on, works great. No scrolling, no zooming in and out. Just works. Page turn your way through. For now, we're not going to release an EPUB.

http://haskellbook.com/faq.html

lone_haxx0r• 7 years ago

Please, no. A million times: No.

Either all desktop epub readers suck or the format itself is bad, but as an end user, I've never felt pleased with any epub ever. I've tried many readers, configurations, etc (I've even thought about making my own epub reader program that doesn't suck, but I haven't had any time.)

Epubs always look wrong: the formatting is all over the place, fonts look off, I don't even know what font I'm supposed to use. Calibre allows me to use CSS for styling, but I've never managed to do what I need.

I've spent many hours trying to like epub, trying to tweak Calibre so that it doesn't look like complete crap (e.g. setting good margins), but to no avail.

PDFs almost always look fine. I don't have to think about fonts, margins, etc. it just works.

miki123211• 7 years ago

Even better suggestion, If you've used Markdown or similar to write the book, relese the source (and an artifact, i.e. EPUB). I have seen so many books that I wanted to read but couldn't, because EPUB and PDF aren't great when it comes to accessibility, particularly with maths and diagrams. Getting access to the Markdown source usually solved all of my problems.

barbs• 7 years ago

Why not both?

fjsolwmv• 7 years ago

Why do publishers agree to rights reversion? It reduces heir opportunity to directly profit and it increases competition for their other books they sell.

Veen6• 7 years ago

It's often in the writer's contract that rights revert after a certain period, or if the book goes out of print, or if the publisher has not exercised the rights in the contract. Even if it isn't, a digital version might increase sales of a physical version, and some money is better than none.

Matticus_Rex• 7 years ago

Most books (especially more than a year in) aren't actually a profit opportunity, and the effect of increasing competition for their other books is small enough to be totally negligible (at least in the current state of the market). And, as the other comment said, free ebooks can drive book sales.

dmwallin• 7 years ago

I imagine there are probably some tax benefits if they can write it off.

Veen6• 7 years ago

I'd urge writers to release in as many formats as possible. Personally, I prefer reading PDFs on my iPad because the typography is often superior to ePub readers.

Angostura• 7 years ago

Hmmm? pop a ePub into iBooks on your iPad and you change font, size etc to your hearts content and it will reflow nicely. Not so with a PDF

ghaff4• 7 years ago

That assumes it's just a flow. A lot of the time books have sidebars and other elements that don't just flow into an ePub. Footnotes also don't work as well.

Veen6• 7 years ago

I'm reading the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language at the moment. It has a complex layout with varied typography, examples with subscripts and superscripts, text that's left, center, and right aligned, callout boxes, sidebars, diagrams, tables, multiple heading levels, footnotes and so on. ePub simply can't handle complex layouts or typographic requirements beyond those you'd find in a novel. Also, the justification and hyphenation algorithms in ePub readers are typically complete crap.

auggierose• 7 years ago

Yeah, not really. Papers and scientific books / math books usually are very dependent on layout and PDF is just the better choice here.

derefr• 7 years ago

The CSS text-reflow engine (which ePub relies upon) doesn’t spend nearly as much time on the layout of your page as e.g. LaTeX. Thus, the results are vastly subpar to putting the book through a professional rendering engine, outputting to PDF with a page size targeted to the given device.

This isn’t anything to do with PDF, of course; it’s just representing the baked result of a text rendering process. Your device could do that rendering itself just fine; it’d just take a while (much longer than it takes to change font family/font size and see the result in your favourite eBook reader.)

It’d be interesting to see an ePub-like standard that kept the text as semantic text, and rendered “at runtime”, but not “in realtime”; rather using a set of render preferences you set up before-hand to render the book once when you first download/sync it. Sort of like how runtimes like .NET dynamically recompile downloaded bytecode to native code to “specialize” the code for the device they’re running on. With such an approach, you could rely on a render-model that actually spens time doing good, constraint-based rendering of the text to avoid rivers/widows/orphans/excessive hyphens/etc.

You could get pretty far in cutting down the perceived time of this render by just splitting each work into chapters and rendering a chapter at a time. You would be able to start reading once the first chapter finished rendering. Which, for most normal types of books, on the sort of CPU an eBook-reader has, would “only” take ~10 seconds.

doc_gunthrop• 7 years ago

Some books are not meant to have any changes to fonts, size or reflow. "House of Leaves" is one example of a book formatted specifically for printed books which does not translate well to ePub. (source: I read this book in epub)

When it comes to preserving the intended layout, PDF simply translates better.

jwr• 7 years ago

I'd much rather have a PDF. I can open it in Documents (from Readdle), which is super-fast and lets me quickly page through large documents, which is essential for reference-type material or textbooks.

I am also sensitive to bad typography and sadly most ePub readers fail miserably at this. I don't want a "blob of text" with random font sizes.

AlexeyBrin• 7 years ago

Doesn't look so good for programming books, especially for books with source code presented as formatted text and not as images.

brightball• 7 years ago

Same. Especially with technical books that include illustrations, graphs, etc.

kaitai• 7 years ago

And math equations, still a pain....

asicsp2• 7 years ago

agree, especially for technical books with code snippets, tables, etc PDF is the best

I've yet to see a programming book in epub/mobi format that is even reasonably readable

Tyr422• 7 years ago

I urge them to release the raw TeX so I can compile into a pdf with screen size that matches my kindle.

I actually did this for a paper or two, and turns out long math expressions break things, but otherwise not too bad.

I wouldn't mind small page pdfs also being release as well as the large ones.

jolmg• 7 years ago

In that spirit, wasn't DocBook designed to be a source language for as many formats as possible? The Wikipedia article[1] says:

As a semantic language, DocBook enables its users to create document content in a presentation-neutral form that captures the logical structure of the content; that content can then be published in a variety of formats, including HTML, XHTML, EPUB, PDF, man pages, Web help[2] and HTML Help, without requiring users to make any changes to the source. In other words, when a document is written in DocBook format it becomes easily portable into other formats. It solves the problem of reformatting by writing it once using XML tags.

I've never understood how to compile to a target format, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook

throwayEngineer2• 7 years ago

I changed my book from 10$ to free.

After 300 sales I decided it was better to let hundreds of thousands learn how to save money, than 300.

My only regret is there is no positive feedback.

With a sale, I get an email and paid. With a book view, I barely get analytics.

I suppose my request as an author, give feedback. At least let me know what you like or didn't like.

martin_a2• 7 years ago

Have you thought about asking for a symbolic price like $1?

falcor84• 7 years ago

In my experience, even just $1 would have a significant chilling effect. And making the book available for free has the benefit of helping those who don't have credit cards (due to e.g. geography, socioeconomics or age).

A nice alternative can be a "pay what you want"approach, with a recommended amount and an option to pay nothing.

OJFord2• 7 years ago

$1 is cheap.

Free is author offering knowledge for free.

arendtio• 7 years ago

Maybe you should ask for an e-mail address and let the readers decide if and when they want to get a link to write some feedback ;-)

asicsp2• 7 years ago

I do the opposite, I release my books for free for a few days and then put the price I want to.

Agree with feedback, would be a great motivation to receive positive comments and a chance to improve if it is critical. With novels, we generally leave a rating and possibly a review on goodreads/amazon/etc but with self-published route, that isn't an option.

I'm thinking of conducting live video sessions based on book to get active feedback

Blackstone4• 7 years ago

People tend to value something if they have to pay for it. Similar to how humans behave around expensive fashionable goods.

If I pay for something, I make sure I make the most of it versus something that is free.

austhrow743• 7 years ago

Haven't read your book so I can't comment on the execution but from a bit of a look at your site it definitely seems very interesting. Topic wise you're killing it.

Bookmarked to have a read over the weekend.

Invictus0• 7 years ago

Where can I find your book?

throwayEngineer2• 7 years ago

https://efficiencyiseverything.com/efficiency-everything-coo...

The cookbook was my best seller. Hope you enjoy!

bookofjoe2• 7 years ago

My book costs $20.95 hardcover/10.95 paperback on Amazon. When Kindle books and the Kindle went live, I added a Kindle version. I wanted to make it free, but Amazon mandates a minimum price of 99 cents, so that's what it costs.

jessriedel• 7 years ago

Make sure to ask for feed back on the website and in the book PDF.

60654• 7 years ago

What a great reminder to authors that it's possible. Especially in tech, since the various technologies get replaced so quickly - quite a few books barely sell out the first printing before they're already obsolete. Why not put them up online for free after that.

Plus, the freebie can serve double duty as free marketing for the next edition.

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

On a side topic, how does one arrange the rights for a self published book (ie If I write a book but publish myself is putting "(c) Paul" good enough?)

Edit: mostly I don't need to or it's obvious https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-do-i-...

This article it seems is mostly where you assigned away your rights to a company if it falls out of publication.

asplake• 7 years ago

Read your contract before signing. For my two most recent books I retain the right to buy the publisher out (not a traditional publisher but one serving the self-pub market).

FarhadG• 7 years ago

- (React) Have sold thousands and now offered for free: https://leanpub.com/ui-react

- (Real-Time Rendering with WebGL2) Just reached out to the publisher. Let's see what happens: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-...

skookumchuck• 7 years ago

Very, very few authors make enough off of their books to live on. They write a book, make a few hundred or a few thousand off of it, the book goes out of print, they're forgotten.

At least re-release it for free after the first two or three years. Then, it serves as an advertisement for your skills or the next book you write.

ghaff4• 7 years ago

Then, it serves as an advertisement for your skills or the next book you write.

That assumes the book still serves as a good advertisement. Whether it's just because your writing skills have improved or because, for non-fiction, things have changed and your book is very out of date, you may not really want people to judge you by it.

I eventually pulled a book I wrote about 6 years ago because so much had fundamentally changed in the technologies and market dynamics I had written about at the time. (You can actually still get it for free from my website in PDF but it's not really something that would be useful for anyone outside of providing a dated historical snapshot.)

pfranz3• 7 years ago

While it can confuse things to have out of date documentation out there. I often get stuck with setups using out of date software. Maybe it's 1% of 1% of users, but finding good references for out of date stuff is so nice.

chadash11• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work? I'll go a step further and say that I think that authors offering up their work for free hurts the entire ecosystem, since it gives consumers the expectation that information is free.

Look at phone apps as an example. We've gotten to a point that many (maybe most) people won't pay $5 for a high quality game that they get hours of usage out of. So the savviest (in terms of making money) developers make games with a freemium model, giving you a basic game for free, but charging you for extras and add-ons. On the face of it, this is fine, since Jack can decide to make a freemium game and Jill can make her game paid. The problem is that Jill now lives in a world where free games are so much the norm that without incredible marketing power, people won't even take a look at her.

The same thing has taken hold in much of the software we use. It's hard to get my boss to agree to pay $300 for a non-open source, but really nifty JS library, because there's an inferior version available for free. Another example is Matlab, which is paid software but is slowly losing marketshare to Python for scientific computing (numpy/scipy). I personally prefer the latter, but when I tried out the former in grad school, I was impressed with how well Matlab was documented and that I could reach out to them and get quick answers if things weren't working as I expected them to (hint: in python/scipy, things were often a little bit off in the code. With matlab, it was usually something I was doing. But it's very helpful to have a paid expert get back to me and tell me that). It's a shame that people have gotten so used to free software that they often won't consider paid software anymore.

I get that for things that involve security, you might want to be able to audit things. And I also think that we 100% need some things to be open standards decided on by the community. I'm not against free software, I'm against people not being able to make a living writing paid software. Or someone spending a lot of time writing a great piece of paid software only for someone to come along and immediately copy them with a free version.

I don't think that the same thing has taken hold yet with books. By and large, people are still willing to pay for these. But I sure hope it stays that way.

EDIT: I agree with many that the length of copyrights is ridiculous. I like the idea of copyright generally, but I think that we need to strike a balance where producing information is rewarded but has its limits. I don't know what the answer should be, but life of author plus 70 years (current rule in the US) seems a bit excessive.

EDIT 2: To show where we area potentially headed, look no further than newspapers. How many newspapers that exist today are going to be viable over the next 20 years? Even local newspapers in major cities are struggling because people today have the expectation that news should be free. I think that there are interesting proposals for government funding that would allow citizens to allocate a share of funds to media outlets of their choice. I haven't really given these much thought. But absent something like that, the future is going to be filled with a small number of big players plus a lot of tabloids, eyeball grabbing headlines, and outright fake news.

pault• 7 years ago

It's hard to get my boss to agree to pay $300 for a non-open source, but really nifty JS library

That's pretty bad. Every company I've ever worked at allowed anything under $500 to be charged to the company card without prior approval.

gdhbcc2• 7 years ago

Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.

chadash11• 7 years ago

Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.

There's no question that humanity benefits from free access to information. But humanity also benefits from high quality information, and the way you get there is by rewarding people for producing it. Most great modern literature is the result of publishers who paid authors for their work. Free information is great, but in my opinion, it's not worth losing the literature from Dickens, Tolstoy or Fitzgerald, or countless other great authors whose work is available at a reasonable price and at least some of whom (I'd venture to guess most of whom) might not have written these works without monetary incentive. And that monetary incentive only exists because we grant people exclusive rights to their intellectual property.

clarry2• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work?

No. The question is what's the right way to get there?

I'll go a step further and say that I think that authors offering up their work for free hurts the entire ecosystem, since it gives consumers the expectation that information is free.

Once produced, information should be free. Doing research, writing it down, making a book, none of that needs to be free.

yinyang_in• 7 years ago

Can you explain more up here, is research/making/writing is not free, how should one get paid for it(research/../..) ?

Veen6• 7 years ago

Doing research, writing it down, making a book, none of that needs to be free.

That works in some cases. I get paid for ghost writing articles and books for business people. They usually publish for free to make themselves look clever. But no one would claim that the result is independent or motivated by artistic creativity.

Your model is fine for hackwork and what is essentially marketing, but that's about all it's fine for. No one would have paid $INSERT_FAVORITE_NOVELIST to research and write their novels if they knew there'd be zero chance of making a return on that investment.

djsumdog• 7 years ago

I had the feeling the author was talking about out-of-print books. It was talked about a bit, but that wasn't the main emphasis.

I guess a hybrid model would be good. If you can get your book to a publisher, they'll pay you that initial signing price, and royalties. Often you get the benefits of their promotion networks. Sometimes you have to agree to book tours or talks depending on the type of book/publisher.

Then after your book has been pulled from print, or it's only printed on-demand from Amazon sales, see if you can give it an open access release. That way an author can get that initial bump of money, plus the possibility of long tail readership.

If you're an author lucky enough to get really popular (with a fiction novel) and your book takes off, obviously the 2nd part won't come about and maybe you should just try to see that it happens in your will after you've past. However few published authors are RR Martins or Kim Robinsons. ... Although, now I wonder what type of world we'd be in if great authors, instead of passing on book rights to their families/estates, arranged for their books to be Creative Commons after they die.

malshe• 7 years ago

Not completely unrelated: "Reflections of a Textbook Author" by Greg Mankiw

This is a PDF

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/reflections_o...

koala_man• 7 years ago

We've gotten to a point that many (maybe most) people won't pay $5 for a high quality game that they get hours of usage out of.

I would love if I could pay $5 for a high quality game I got hours of use out of.

Currently my only option is to pay $5 for a spin on a shitty slot machine that 95% of the time gives me template trash or a college assignment.

As a result I'm happy to pay $15 for a game on Steam, but I'll agonize forever over a $2 phone game.

pergadad• 7 years ago

Most books aren't really profitable. Even for the publishers the only really profitable books are few and far between, especially for non-fiction. The main benefit most authors gain seems to be to stake their claim as "expert" and charge higher rates/start consulting on this basis.

pfranz3• 7 years ago

I think technical books are a bit different than a lot of other books. They generally have a smaller audience and are most valid for a year or two. These and text books (for core subjects) have always been around $50-$100. More niche books or reference books are many times more.

Since the audience is small and most of the benefit is early on, I think there's a lot of value in publicly releasing it later. Much like id Software tends to open source their engines about 5 years after release even though they would license and sell it for many thousands of dollars.

About your javascript example. A lot of companies are just very tight with money. I doubt most places I worked would use version control if it wasn't free. Years would go by when we needed to update something like MySQL on a server, but nobody had the time. I'd ask, "Can't we just get a contractor to carry it out? We're all busy and it doesn't make sense to hire someone full time." but that fell on deaf ears. I imagine part of it as mindlessly sticking to a system that has worked for them (only having full time workers and doing everything in house) and part of it is getting burned by wasting money on unused services. I've often seen, "We're paying 10k a year for that? I can install/port an open source version and spend probably 10 hours a year maintaining it"

Personally, I've pushed to open source anything that's not a competitive advantage. I see everyone wasting too much time doing the same thing at multiple companies that just take time away from what we like/want doing and what makes us money.

otakucode4• 7 years ago

Oh, the post points out that Physically Based Rendering is free now (a 2016 book). I'm not even mad. It was worth the steep price it originally cost. If you're interested in rendering based on physics, it's excellent. If you're interested in "literate coding" where the manuscript and the source code are the same thing, it is stellar as that is the way it was built. I highly recommend it.

ChuckMcM• 7 years ago

I wish more authors would do this. I too prefer EPUB but I recognize there is lower friction to just publish it as a PDF.

xrd• 7 years ago

O'Reilly let me put my book up. Thanks O'Reilly for being a cool publisher!

https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/

kvartz• 7 years ago

I agree with author's point in regard of fiction/non fiction literature, as it gets traction among readers there is a better chance to sell a hard copy or get a citation.

However in case of professional and academic literature, as much as I would prefer that personally, such approach simply is not maintainable.

The best middle ground I've come across is when author gives out free copies per each request (like a letter from student who can't afford to pay the full amount)

harshreality• 7 years ago

I support this in principle, but doesn't Amazon require that you not sell the book anywhere for less than the Amazon price? I'm pretty sure that means you can't give it away for free, either. I think that's why, although some books that are sold for money on Amazon are creative commons licensed, you won't generally find them on the authors' websites. It's legal, but I think it's a violation of the author or publisher's contract with Amazon to do that.

3rd parties can make such books available, though... legally, at least. In that situation, Amazon's TOS (assuming it has something like "thou shalt not redistribute any books purchased from Amazon without Amazon's permission") for ebook buyers would violate the clearly stated book license, so the TOS would become void, right?

maire• 7 years ago

I don't know what the TOS looks like, but Amazon is currently charging for books that are free on Project Gutenberg. Amazon does not seem to have a problem with making money on otherwise free books.

notatoad• 7 years ago

The rules for self-published books on amazon and the rules for publishers are very different. if you have a book published through KDP you almost certainly can't offer it for free, but if you're published through through one of the big 5 then you can do whatever your deal with the publisher says.

Get Your Book, Make It Free

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