Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)

https://blog.plover.com/book/free-hop.html

by luu • 6 years ago

386 134 6 years ago

blog.plover.com

insulanian• 6 years ago

"Free stuff sells well!"

-- I can't remember where I've read it.

bachmeier• 6 years ago

Mark Twain

marijn• 6 years ago

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.

billpollock• 6 years ago

You're probably right.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

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?

diggan4• 6 years ago

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)

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

How about Google Books? Does that not obviate the need for outright piracy?

HumblyTossed• 6 years ago

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.

aswanson• 6 years ago

Your book is excellent. Downloading and reading it made me feel incredibly guilty for not paying for it, so I bought a hard copy.

keeganpoppen• 6 years ago

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! :)

throw0101a• 6 years ago

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.

specialist2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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 :-)

harryf• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

gorgoiler• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

mjd10• 6 years ago

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.

notRobot• 6 years ago

Article is from '14.

DrNuke2• 6 years ago

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?

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

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.

asicsp4• 6 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 years ago

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.)

diggan4• 6 years ago

"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/

asicsp4• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

nonrecursive• 6 years ago

thank you for the kind words :)

Poems• 6 years ago

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"?

diggan4• 6 years ago

Yeah, "Clojure For The Brave and True" (CFTBT) is perfect for your first steps with Clojure, then diving into the deeper/bigger books. In the beginning I basically used CFTBT as a tutorial/guide for finding concepts then using "Clojure Programming" (O'Reilly Media, by Chas Emerick + more) as a reference if I wanted to dive deeper into a specific concept, as "Clojure Programming" goes a lot deeper into subjects, but the subjects don't feel like they are in any particular order in the book itself.

I think the lightweight humor and good explanations is what kept me from getting discouraged, as some Clojure books did to me before I came across CFTBT.

steveklabnik• 6 years ago

The Rust Programming Language is, in part, also with No Starch for this reason.

CorbenDallas2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

CorbenDallas2• 6 years ago

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.

zerr6• 6 years ago

Nowadays books get leaked directly from the publisher, no need to OCR.

DanBC• 6 years ago

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...

arkpafisto• 6 years ago

"... the book was published in 2005, and has been available as a free download since 2008"

Actually he didn't follow the advice.

zerr6• 6 years ago

Interesting to see how did it affect the sales.

jimhefferon• 6 years ago

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.)

mjd10• 6 years ago

The publisher _requested_ that I wait six months, and I agreed to that.

mjd10• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm very disorganized. Also, I had a new baby in mid-2004 and I was really busy for a couple of years.

zerr6• 6 years ago

Btw, any plans for Raku variant of the book?

IAmEveryone• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

Fragoel2• 6 years ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

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

franze• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

andai2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

pgcj_poster• 6 years ago

Even if most books aren't worth it, shouldn't you still pay for the handful that are?

maps7• 6 years ago

Does anyone have a list of free programming books?

asicsp4• 6 years ago

https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/bl...

https://devfreebooks.github.io/

brogrammer2018• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing

roland35• 6 years ago

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.

rikroots5• 6 years ago

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.

radicalbyte• 6 years ago

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.

qqn2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

That's "Sita Sings the Blues". And I highly recommend it.

specialist2• 6 years ago

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.

abnry2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

Why not both? Charge for physical/kindle copies on Amazon, give away PDF for free on your personal website.

rikroots5• 6 years ago

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.

vasili111• 6 years ago

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.

ysavir• 6 years ago

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?

mark_l_watson3• 6 years ago

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.

Alex3917• 6 years ago

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.

MaxGabriel• 6 years ago

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.

swayvil• 6 years ago

srsly. This is the age of blogs and reddit posts. "Book" is just one possible shape, and certainly not a universal ideal.

rikroots5• 6 years ago

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/

jasonv• 6 years ago

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.

abjKT26nO82• 6 years ago

You can bookmark individual pages in PDFs. PDFs also have the advantage that they are trivial to archive (just copy the file), whereas with websites you'd have to download all the assets (and know which assets to download, so you don't download the whole domain). Another thing is that web browsers these days are pain to use. I'd much rather view a book in a proper document viewer. PDFs also allow for much better typography than web browsers. And forget about having a standard way to render mathematics well in at least 3 different web browsers.

zach_garwood• 6 years ago

"There ain't no money in poetry / That's what sets the poet free." --Guy Clark

worik2• 6 years ago

My daughter made a living (pre Covid-19) for five years a s a poet on the streets of a major city....

api• 6 years ago

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.

rikroots5• 6 years ago

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.

vl• 6 years ago

Greenspun follows his own advice and published his book online for free as well:

http://www.realworlddivorce.com/

hn_check• 6 years ago

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.

mjd10• 6 years ago

I hope that someday you discover that people sometimes do things for reasons other than “self-promotion”.

dorfsmay2• 6 years ago

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.

Veera_Sivarajan• 6 years ago

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.

fullstop2• 6 years ago

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/

jessaustin2• 6 years ago

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.

fullstop2• 6 years ago

Yep. Even something far more subtle like a hoodie with a Gold Morning symbol on the sleeve would sell very well.

Edit: as for the rabbit hole, I spent a fair amount of my free time over the course of three months reading this. It definitely sucked me in.

mark_l_watson3• 6 years ago

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.

kragen2• 6 years ago

If you remove the no-derivatives clause it becomes legal for people to translate them into other languages.

mark_l_watson3• 6 years ago

Thanks, I will look into that. Good idea!

Fun story: some guy in China emailed me about five years ago that he was translating my old Java AI book and placing his name as the author. He said sorry but there was nothing I could do about it. It was strange, but I appreciated him being up front about it. My wife and I had recently returned from a fun trip to China (very friendly people, lots of interesting things to see) and to be honest I didn’t much care.

svat• 6 years ago

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...

djaychela• 6 years ago

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

dang• 6 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8692627

munificent2• 6 years ago

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.

lazyant• 6 years ago

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.

Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)

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