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Programming IT Technology

Prentice Hall To Publish Open Content Licensed Books 245

Posted by timothy from the you-can-call-him-bruce dept.
lma writes "Bruce Perens has convinced Prentice Hall to publish a series of books under an Open Source license. The 'Bruce Perens' Open Source Series' will be available first as hardcopy in bookstores, and the Open Source text will be available electronically a few months later. Prentice Hall is counting on people buying the books even though the electronic version will be freely available later. I like the model, since I prefer to read paper, but like the electronic version for reference."
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Prentice Hall To Publish Open Content Licensed Books More

Prentice Hall To Publish Open Content Licensed Books

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  • My prediction... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anand_S ( 638598 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:37PM (#5023128)
    The Microsoft Press will be pissed about this. "Open Source books will be the death of the industry!"

    • Re:My prediction... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:02PM (#5023231) Homepage Journal
      Let's give them a run for their money :-) To do that, we need to make this a big bookshelf. Want to write something? I need authors. It won't make you rich, but it will do good for both you and the world.

      Thanks

      Bruce

      • What topics are you looking for? I'm not saying that I'll write anything; I don't think I'd have the skill. (I'm a freshmen (though officially entering my 4th semester; thanks AP credits!) going for simultaneous BS and MS/ME in comp sci at Penn State's honors program.) That said, I have toyed with the idea of doing an intro to C++ web site (because 70 gabollion isn't quite a big enough number) in a pseudo-book form. No sane person would actually want to use this as even a base for something to publish (not only because the quality of the work but because several section headings are stolen from C++ for Dummies), but I'm willing to put it up in the internet if you'd like to see it. That is, IF I can find it; I just did a search of the hard drive in my main computer with no hits.

        • Re:My prediction... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Monday January 06, 2003 @12:07AM (#5023504) Homepage Journal
          Mostly I am looking for user or developer documentation for Free Software. I would hope that I'll get some of the software authors, but I recognize that many of them would rather code. Note also that writing a book does not make you wealthy (me neither). It doesn't pay as well as consulting. On the other hand, if you aren't working anyway... The benefit of writing a book is that you are valued more as an employee, consultant, or scholar. You know the cliche: He wrote the book about it!

          Bruce

          • Re:My prediction... (Score:2, Insightful)

            by AuMatar ( 183847 )
            Here's to hoping you read this- would it be possible to put a list of subjects that need doing (not an exclusive list, but a list of things that would make good additions) on a website? I'm sure a lot of people would be glad to contribute, but have no idea where to start, or what would be accepted for publication.
      • I can't write a good book. I know i can't and im ok with that but i WOULD like to support this. I am going to buy the books that interest me AND get the electronic data. Nobody will convince me books can be totally replaced with anything but i really like the ability to search an entire text for a certain string. I may not make you authors rich but i know i wont go broke giving you what support i can.

      • Re:My prediction... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AntiFreeze ( 31247 )
        Well, what kind of range in books are you looking for?

        Are you just looking for thicker technical manuals, or are you considering expanding some HOWTOs into books form, writing and expanding better and more detailed man and info pages, teaching certain tools from scratch, putting together cohesive references for the open source developer, or other documents like that?

        Some of these really need to be written. But as part of your series? What areas do you want to see covered, what areas do you think have been covered enough, and what areas do you think should be left to O'Reilley?

        Or to go backwards, there's one area I feel O'Reilley is extremely poor in: development with multiple tools. I'm not talking lex and yacc, but rather (off the top of my head) perl and C, or pyhton and shell scripts. They have "perl for sysadmins" and pocket references, but no good books on how to use separate tools well together. The closest they come to discussing the use of separate tools together (from what I've read, and I may be completely missing a section of their books) are their books on web CGI programming.

        If there were a good book out there on, say, how to use perl and python together to write text-intensive apps with killer object models, I'd buy it in a second. My point is, there are a lot of tools out there, and I think there just aren't good books out there on how to use the tools together -- each tools seems to be encased in its own book with very spartan references to how to use it with other tools. This can be fixed, easily. I think books bridging tools together could do very well.

        So what do you want to get written?

        • What's great about HOWTOs is that they arent as thick as a book. Expand one to book-form and you've got yourself a worthless fucking book.
          "No, what's great about HOWTOs is that they tell you HOW TO DO IT, it doesnt matter how long they are."
          ^-- Shut up.

      • Re:My prediction... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Robotech_Master ( 14247 ) on Monday January 06, 2003 @01:34AM (#5023820) Homepage Journal
        What you need to do is put the electronic version online before or concurrently with the print version. See the Baen Free Library [baen.com], Baen Webscriptions [webscription.net], and the Honor Harrington CD-ROM [stack.nl] (now hosted on-line in its entirety by express permission of Jim Baen).

        And see this quote from Jim Baen, on the Baen Bar:
        Baen has experienced a mysterious 50% increase in gross dollar sales in the previous year. Also, our "sellthrough" (percentage of books placed in the market that sell to end-point customers) has improved from the rather startling 63% to the truly stunning 74%. I'm tentatively blamiing this on my wacko e-net proclivities. (Insert a Crazy Eddie ad pastiche here)
        There's every sign that having the books available for free or cheap on-line has done nothing but good for the sale of print books by Baen. It might do the same for you.

        • Re:My prediction... (Score:3, Informative)

          by ChaosDiscord ( 4913 )
          What you need to do is put the electronic version online
          before or concurrently with the print version. See the Baen Free Library...

          I love the Baen Free Library (BFL), but I think you're misrepresenting the results. By and large the books in the BFL were placed online after the print version. In most cases, significantly after, long after the print version is selling only handfuls of copies. In this case, yes, there is strong evidence [baen.com] that a free online version can boost print sales. The BFL doesn't publish stuff in new release specifically because of concerns of gutting sales. Mind you, the BFL's concern doesn't mean that the free release will gut sales, just that they're not willing to be the one to do the experiment at the risk of sales.

          Relatedly, I encourage everyone to visit Baen Free Library [baen.com], if only "Prime Palaver" articles in which the person manging the library discusses the plan and the actual results. It's very enlightening.

    • Actually Microsoft Press in the same position relative to Microsoft that the software being donated to Linux is from most of the Hardware companies. That is Microsoft doesn't really make that much money of their Microsoft Press books (many of which are very good BTW). Further most of these books teach people about their products.

      It might be an excellent way for Microsoft to experiment with a BSD type licensing scheme on products where they would be willing to see sales dry up in a worst comes to worst type scenerio.

  • Novel Concept, But Not the First (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CBNobi ( 141146 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:39PM (#5023133)
    Bruce Eckel's been releasing his programming books electronically [mindview.net] for the past few years. (Not sure of its licensing, however)

    This is probably one of the first cases of a publisher supporting this, however.
    • Eckel is to be commended for his bravery, and generosity in doing this.

      I own the printed versions of his Thinking in C++ & Java books, and keep the HTML versions at home & office.

      It would be nice if ORA did this more often, instead of leasing access to electronic copies through Safari.

    • Baen books has supported free novels for a while now, see http://www.baen.com/library/

      Their idea is that the more people read "free" novels, the more likely they are to purchase novels from the same author in the future.

    • Re:Novel Concept, But Not the First (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:26PM (#5023341) Homepage Journal
      I'm not claiming to be the first. Go look at Creative Commons for a list of people who got there before me. But Prentice is the world's largest technical book publisher and that's important. They have done individual titles under the OPL before, but never a series.

      Thanks

      Bruce

    • A note about the license (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:31PM (#5023365) Homepage Journal
      The license, at present, is the Open Publication License with no options taken. If any of the options were taken, it would not be an Open Source license (the options restrict modification and commercial use). We are open to other Free Software licenses, my contract explicitly allows the GNU Free Documentation License (which I would like to see used without immutable sections, which I feel make the work not Open Source).

      Thanks

      Bruce

    • Here [theassayer.org] is a list of all the publishers I know of that are involved in print-publishing free books. If anyone knows of more, let me know! [lightandmatter.com]
  • I read Using Perl 5 for Web Programming AND later dl'd the CD of it I must say the open source thingy works great with books.

  • Assuming the quality of the titles... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nutrimentia ( 467408 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:41PM (#5023147) Homepage
    this may prove to be a defining moment in the battle of copyright control. If these books sell, and continue to sell after the electronic copy is available, it will add some serious weight to the argument that digital availability of information precludes sales and marketability.

    I'm a bit surprised they are publishing in hardcover instead of a Sam's/O'Reilley/etc sturdy paperback though.
    • It's a soft cover. Pretty much like every other technical book these days. I haven't tested the binding for durability, but I'd hope these folks have that down by now.

      Thanks

      Bruce

  • Nice title (Score:2, Funny)

    by tmark ( 230091 )
    If I were less cynical, I might think that naming the series *after himself* wasn't *just* an ego-stroking maneuver, aimed at garnering maximum publicity. Please, someone inside Prentice-Hall tell me it was their idea to come up with that goofy series name and not Perens' - after all, we all know Perens seems to like to keep his name out of the press...

    • Re:Nice title (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:08PM (#5023261) Homepage Journal
      I sincerely did not ask for it to be named after me. That's Prentice's idea, and they need my name there to differentiate them from any other Open Source line that someone else does. I find it a bit embarassing, but will live with it for the good of making books that are Open Source licensed.

      Actually, it has created tremendous difficulty for me. I have to get all of the doors widened in my home now, so that I can get my head through them :-)

      Bruce

    • Could be worse. The series could be called the "GNU/Open Source Series."

      • Re:Nice title (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Bruce Perens ( 3872 )
        Richard will be annoyed. But then I've done a few things to piss him off lately. I hope he will be somewhat consoled by the fact that the books are free software.

        Bruce

  • Finally, I don't have to... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jmuzic1 ( 637784 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:43PM (#5023156)
    lug all my books home every day. I can see it now..."Open source may provide treatment for back pain"

  • Oreilly / MySQL Reference Manual (Score:4, Informative)

    by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:43PM (#5023157) Journal
    >>This is a tremendous departure for a mainstream publisher.

    ORA [oreilly.com] has done this already with a MySQL book. At the time of publication no less.

    Granted, it's the printed version of the electronic reference manual. But it IS an open source book. I think they're calling it O'Reilly Community press.

    Additionally, ORA open sources some of their out of prints.
    • Yes, I assume the logic behind keeping the source closed for a few months is that it will FORCE people to buy the book if they really want it. The secondary assumption is that no one will buy it if it is open. Both assumptions are FLAWED IMNSHO.

      Ah well, perhaps one day they'll have the guts to go the whole mile and start REAL open publishing by printing on demand the latest version of the book. Being first in the market with all the tools and support would be a great advantage, maybe they'll get IT one day.

      • Re:Oreilly / MySQL Reference Manual (Score:4, Informative)

        by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:59PM (#5023219) Homepage Journal
        The assumptions are not necessarily flawed, they just may not apply to 100% of the people. We want to make some money. We're willing to experiment.

        This series is in retail stores. I appreciate that demand publishing can do great things, but it's more of a mail-order phenomenon until it gets inexpensive enough to put the unit in a vending machine. And will that change things!

        Bruce

      • print on demand (Score:2, Informative)

        by bcrowell ( 177657 )
        Print-on-demand (POD) is the great technology that never happened. It does exist, but it's pretty much a vanity press phenomenon --- you know, the kind of book that only gets bought by the author's friends and relatives. The POD publishers I've seen also had truly horrible contracts.

        When you come right down to it, a book is something that it makes sense to mass produce. Printing and binding a book is a specialized, highly technical skill. You have to know what you're doing. You have to pick what kind of paper to use. If it's not just a one-color job, it gets very complicated.

        Being first in the market with all the tools and support would be a great advantage, maybe they'll get IT one day.
        It sounds to me like a market that would be inherently very competitive and low in profit margins.

        Yes, I assume the logic behind keeping the source closed for a few months is that it will FORCE people to buy the book if they really want it. The secondary assumption is that no one will buy it if it is open.
        It doesn't sound like you understand the economics of print-publishing. In print publishing, it's all about quantity. Printing 10,000 copies of the books doesn't even cost that much more than printing 1,000. Because of this extreme economy of scale, you print as many books as you can possibly hope to sell -- more, actually, because they cost virtually nothing to produce once the job is set up. With a technical book, you certainly do not sell all those books in the space of a few months.

        I think more likely Printice Hall has a realistic idea of how they can use a free book as a cheap and effective sales tool.

    • Re:Oreilly / MySQL Reference Manual (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:57PM (#5023207) Homepage Journal
      I don't want to diminish O'Reilly's efforts, they did the original Open Sources book mostly in Open Source, and a number of others, and some other publishers have as well (about my favorite is the Ruby book). But Prentice Hall is the largest technical book publisher in the world.

      Thanks

      Bruce

    • I was suprised nobody has mentioned this, but 'Linux Device Drivers' and several other current, important O'Reilly books are published under the GNU Documentation Liscense. I posted somthing like this post in todays /. O'Reilly anniversery post.

      I think it's a great model, because I, and almost anyone I know, will pay to have an important book in hardcopy.

      Kudos to O'Reilly and Prentice Hall for having the guts to do this, and to the authors also.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:43PM (#5023158)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Amen to that! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rindeee ( 530084 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:46PM (#5023168)
    I will ALWAYS buy good 'ole ink and pulp as I much prefer reading them. For reference I much prefer the searchability and rapid access of electronic (and the ability to carry a bunch of them on my handheld). I have gone so far as to "un-bind" some of my favorites, scan them and OCR/index them so that I can search them electronically. Then I have to go buy another copy to replace the one I destroyed. No more! I say hurray for this. Now I just hope these books don't suck.

  • Perens' vs Safari (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How does this stack up with Safari?

    Safari has a wider access (I assume Perens' line of books will take a while to reach their "ransom" target and be released openly) but which is the more useful? Safari's "Pay money, download all the ebooks we let you eat, right now" approach, or Perens' "Don't pay money, download and mess with the books all you want, but be prepared to wait"?

    • I'd position the current paradigm we are using in these terms:

      These are paper books just like all of the other paper books in the book store. We pay the authors the same, we wholesale them the same, and you pay for them the same. They happen to be under a license that lets you shove them in the copier with impunity. A bit later, not too long, you get nice clean electronic "source code". People who don't want to pay for the book could use it, but we don't think there really are a ton of them. The license is a real plus to the author, as the books need never die even if the publisher loses interest, and there is no fight about electronic rights as authors are having with most publishers. We might be able to do second editions a bit more often, if we get enough community help.

      • I think I like this new model quite well. If I'm in a raving hurry to acquire a title, I can do so immediately; if it's something of marginal interest that I might not normally buy, I can wait for the ebook.. which I might then decide I like well enough that I want hardcopy too, or maybe it will set me to looking forward to the next similar title.

        Aside from the obvious opengoodness of free ebooks, it's cheap advertising for future hardcopy publications on the same subjects or by the same authors. Everybody happy!

  • why do I suspect (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SHEENmaster ( 581283 ) <travis&utk,edu> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:49PM (#5023184) Homepage Journal
    that when it finally comes out, months after the book, it will be in a clunky format such as pdf rather than something like sgml that we can convert to linked html or plain text as we desire.

    cat ebook.txt | grep explorer | grep bug | less to get all the paragraphs relating to the latest explorer bug.

    For an ebook format, I want something parsable and convertabl; pdf meets neither requirement.

    • Re:why do I suspect (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:56PM (#5023456) Homepage Journal
      It will be in an editable format. We would like your changes for the second edition, after all. Unfortunately, they are still operating a .doc file shop there at Prentice. But we have OpenOffice, which can turn .doc files into its own XML format, as well as several other open formats. I have had no problem using OpenOffice to read the books.

      Bruce

      • in any form that can be at least "ripped" to ASCII by an open source tool we'll be alright.

        You have to admit though that there's irony in having Open Source (tm) books being published in everybodies most hated MS propriatary file format.

        Of course, note that I'm not saying which "side" the irony jabs its pointy little head into. I wonder if use of the .doc format for OSS texts will "infect" MS's own documents made with the same tool. At least it's a thought worth having a chuckle over.

        KFG

  • Open Source? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Quaoar ( 614366 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:52PM (#5023192)
    Does that mean I get to rewrite who won the civil war in my history book? SCORE!

  • Copyleft is important. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @10:57PM (#5023205) Homepage
    I run a web site that catalogs free books (see my sig), and I've seen many many cases where books are originally free for downloading, but then the author's web site mysteriously disappears, and your only option is to buy the print version. This is exactly the sort of thing that gave Richard Stallman conniptions and led to the GPL for software: the idea that software could go from being free to being unfree. In fact, I see it as a much bigger problem for books than for software.

    Too bad there doesn't seem to be any information about what the license is, or what editable form they'll be available in. He does refer to the possibility that profs could edit it and make their own versions.

    • Open Publication License 1.0 with no options taken. It passes the Open Source Definition in that form. OSI will not certify the license because it is actually 4 separate licenses, depending on which of those boxes you check, and only one of them is an Open Source license. I'll try to get an OSI-certified license in place for later works. OSI has really only done one so far that is for text rather than software.

      Thanks

      Bruce

  • I have recently completed a book for Addison-Wesley. Well, almost completed--it needs to make it through copyediting and indexing still, which will probably (unfortunately) mean several more months until it is printed.

    One thing that I did--with permission of my publisher--is make the text of the book completely available during writing, and it will remain so into the future. Shameless plug, you can find it at http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/ [gnosis.cx]. I cannot say honestly that being allowed to provide it this way was a deciding issue in choosing a publisher; but it certainly does make me feel better about writing the book.

    Admittedly, this is not quite the same thing as an OpenContent license. You are free to read the book at the URL listed, and print yourself a personal copy. But the book is under copyright, and you cannot reproduce and sell the text yourself. Still, I believe it is a step in the right direction... maybe my next book will manage to go a step farther.

    Yours, David...

    • This is the same David Mertz that has written a number of Python and XML articles for IBM's developerWorks. It would be nice to see his material get more exposure.

      David, thanks for your great articles and good luck with the book!

  • Astronomy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ShoeHead ( 40158 )
    The group my faculty advisor is in, here at Caltech, has already done this; I wouldn't be surprised if other universities have done it as well. His group published an astronomy textbook under the GPL (!). Readers are allowed to distribute, read, print, and edit the book, and even sell their revisions.

    !: I think this is just incredibly lame--a textbook?? under the GPL?? Sounds to me they're just in there for buzzwords. Surely there's a better way to describe the rights you want to give away / keep. Oh well...

    • Re:Astronomy (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 )
      Please be sure to register the book with Creative Commons. I know that there's a Debian Astronomy package set, besides the ham radio package set which has a lot of satellite stuff. Lots of people can use it.

      Thanks

      Bruce

    • Hey, give us a link!! Where can we find the book?

  • This is perfect (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RainbowSix ( 105550 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:06PM (#5023248) Homepage
    Take for example my paper copy of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've read that thing probably a dozen times. A beautiful work of art. But, there is always that time when I want to find a quote for my website or to have a laugh with someone. That is when the text files are essential.

    I know I'll be buying more books when I know I can search through them, because not every book I've read has been easily locatable scans on my favorite ftp sites :)
    • As they say. On the other hand, have you ever tried to curl up with a good CRT and mini tower? Hell, I haven't even been able to curl up with a good laptop, although lord knows I've tried. I've also noticed that a book's batteries never run down, an admirable quality.

      No doubt about it. The *best* solution is to have a hard copy and an electronic copy and make use of each where each is best. Particularly for technical books, where I think this model not only has promise, but ought to work like a frickin' charm.

      KFG
  • How do I know? Because it worked for Bruce Eckel. Is there really a debate about it?

    The question now is: will it work for all different genres of books. I suspect we'll see some lines drawn in the sand where high margin entertainment titles are concerned.

    Also, we'll probably see a rash of lawsuits or lobbying by the textbook industry to help them maintain the monopoly they have. After all, we wouldn't want continually improving and affordable materials to fall into the hands of our students. Oh! The horror!
    • >>Also, we'll probably see a rash of lawsuits or lobbying by the textbook industry to help them maintain the monopoly they have. After all, we wouldn't want continually improving and affordable materials to fall into the hands of our students. Oh! The horror!

      Really. It's my first year, second semester (well, that's misleading; officially it's my fourth, so I'm taking higher level stuff than your typical second semester person) at Penn State and I'll be paying ~$450 for ALL USED books. Outrageous, especially considering that tuition+room&board+fees for me is little over $1000/semester.

  • The Linux Development Platform: Configuring, Usin and Mainting a Complete Programming Environment

    Heh, open source is always full of bugs. :-)

    Seriously, this looks great, it's good to see a large publisher trying this. It makes a lot of sense to me, especially for computer docs (I own many of the books I read on Safari in paper form for instance). Heck, I wish all books came with a plaintext version of the text on CD or something, just for the grep value.

    I'll definitely be getting the Snort book, and keeping my eye on the series. Kudos all around.

  • Baen is another publisher that has put books out for free on the internet for downloading.

    http://www.baen.com/library/
  • Also of note, the XForms [w3.org] book I'm writing for O'Reilly will be published under the GFDL [gnu.org].

    Before publication, the text-in-progress is also available, but under a somewhat more restrictive [creativecommons.org] license, at http://dubinko.info/writing/xforms/ [dubinko.info].

    This policy at O'Reilly dates back to at least May 2002, when I signed the contract.

    .micah
    • Excellent! I would just love to get into a do-gooding competition with Tim. It would be great fun and would get a lot of good documentation into Open Source.

      Please make sure Creative Commons knows about it. Oops, I'd better register my books there too.

      Thanks

      Bruce

  • David Weber's "War of Honor" came with a very cool CD. The CD contains a copy of the entire Baen Library, as well as all of the previous Honor Harrington books.

    On the front of the CD is stated "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold."

    I think that this is all very cool and encouraging. On the other hand, I'd like to point out that they don't have much legal ground for the "NOT sold" requirement. I can certainly sell the CD itself, it's my property. What they should have said was: "You are granted the right to copy and share this information, provided that you agree not to sell the copies."

    And, unfortunately, the book sucked too. I enjoy politics. Real politics. 1000 pages of fictional politics falls flat in any number of ways. The other books in the series are very good though.
  • Hey, it sounds like a great idea, but come on - if college students can get the book for FREE, then they'll just put off that class for a semester to avoid paying for it.

    College students are NOT a population that anyone should expect to fund this experiment.

  • Ripping off college students one edition at a time (Score:5, Funny)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:32PM (#5023369)
    The books will cost $50-$75 dollars while they're being sold at university bookstores, then released free as soon as the course is over so that the resale value of the book is zero.

    However, the free book will be useless for the next semester's courses, because a new edition will have been released to update the book for the changing technologies, of course.

    See, it is possible to make big money with open source... although this wasn't what we had in mind.
  • Two of those books, the one about Linux development and the one about Snort sound interesting and I'd like to get them. A translation to Russian or Spanish would be nice, but not necessary.

  • This is just "value adding" to the book (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nebbian ( 564148 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:51PM (#5023438) Homepage Journal
    Something that a lot of people don't seem to realise is that an electronic version, freely downloadable on the web, is more like an extra feature than a piracy mechanism.

    I see a time in the future where books will have a little tickbox on the cover that says "Electronic version available". This is an extra feature of the book, much like those textbooks with questions and answers in the back, or a bonus CD-ROM.

    It's all a question of value -- I buy books for the tactile dead-tree-ness of it, not for the raw bits and bytes of the information within. I much prefer using dead trees rather than electronic versions of textbooks, because they are so much more convenient for me.

    So for me, this is a value-add for the book. If there were two books on the shelf for the same price, one with this extra free downloadable version, and one without, then I'd choose the one with the extra bits. Who wouldn't?
    But given the choice between downloading it and then printing it out, vs just buying the damn thing, I'd buy it. Perhaps that's just me, but I much prefer well-bound books to dog-eared collections of paper sheets.

    Well done Bruce! Good to see you're not afraid to embrace new paradigms. I'm sure it will do well :-)
  • Paul Graham's On Lisp [paulgraham.com] is freely downloadable. I have Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp and I hope to read On Lisp after I master Common Lisp. Another one to add to the bookshelf.

  • topics? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drDugan ( 219551 ) on Monday January 06, 2003 @12:03AM (#5023495) Homepage
    really -- this was asked above but not aswered.

    What topics are you looking for? Do they have
    to relate to open source software? Some
    guidelines would be niec if you are soliciting
    authors.

    • Well, I think I have only seen one book proposal refused so far. So, we are open to what you propose.

      They should relate to Open Source software, either as user documentation or as developer documentation. I suppose there are some "Open Source" topics that are not about software - either hardware or policy - and those would work too. If you want to do something else, but it's a technical book, we might be able to help.

      Generally you can ship a CD with the book, so you can make sure that all of the examples are distributed, and you can make sure the version of the software you are writing about is distributed with the book.

  • This looks very promising outside the tech industry, too. Time and again the media reports on errors in school textbooks - Prentice Hall being a main publisher of these books. With an electronic version, schools could purchase the book, then, as time goes on, print out the most current e-version in a course packet format. Instead of purchasing a whole new series of books, they only have to pay for the ink. This is a good thing.
  • The ZooLib Cookbook [goingware.com] is under the GNU Free Documentation License. The DocBook XML source is in ZooLib's CVS [sourceforge.net] at SourceForge.

    I only have a few chapters written so far, and have a lot of work left to do to complete it, but I have made it my New Year's Resolution to complete it by the end of the year.

    To make it more convenient to write, I have used Fink [sourceforge.net] to install DocBook, OpenJade and psgml on my iBook. (Note - fink's psgml is in unstable).

    ZooLib is a multithreaded C++ cross-platform application framework. You can write a single set of sources and compile native applications for Mac OS (classic, 68k and OS X native), Windows, BeOS and Linux, with very little need for platform-specific client code.

    ZooLib itself is fairly portable, it could be brought to a completely new platform in a few weeks of work by someone experienced with it.

    A brief introduction to ZooLib is on it's homepage at http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net].

    Thank you for your attention.

  • What about tomorrow? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by glamslam ( 535995 )
    This model seems to be very good now (most people prefer to read a hard copy to an ebook) and printing a single book is prohibitively expensive.

    But, what happens when books become like CDs (easy and inexpensive to make exact functionality copies)? Would enough people pay for the hardcopy to support the author enough to put food on his table?

    • Re:What about tomorrow? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by yeOldeSkeptic ( 547343 ) on Monday January 06, 2003 @01:05AM (#5023699)
      But, what happens when books become like CDs (easy and inexpensive to make exact functionality copies)? Would enough people pay for the hardcopy to support the author enough to put food on his table?

      Yes they will. If they value their time and the book enough. Even if a laser printed copy of a downloadable is cheaper by a few dollars from the press-printed book, I strongly believe that most people would still go for the convenience and quality of the latter. Why?

      Well, 10 dollars is certainly worth much less than the time that I have to spend printing, collating and having the book bound professionally. I would rather pay the extra ten bucks and avoid the aggravation. So, yes, there will be a market for open books for as long as the value of the book is much greater than the cost of buying it.

      As I see it, open books will revolutionize the industry in the following way.

      1. No book will ever be out of print. Troff is several decades old but it is still alive and kicking in the form of groff. Because groff is open sourced, it will continue to exist in the net somewhere and it will continue to be improved even if only incrementally. Compare that with say, WordPerfect which is almost on the way to extinction. (Please no counter-arguments about warez or how it is still on your hard disk!)
      2. Financially successfull open licensed books will be of a better quality than comparable closed-licensed books. Why? Because in order for the book to succeed it must be of the quality where people are willing to pay for it when a downloadable copy is available. This leads to...
      3. Cost of publishing will drop. Publishers will be able to test probable success of any book cheaply by having it downloadable on the net. All the publisher has to do is log all downloads (in order to count popularity) and provide a survey form inquiring whether the reader would buy a hard-copy of this book if it is available on the market and for how much. No need to print 10,000 copies of a book and then discover what a crap it is. However, it could also mean...
      4. Writing will cease to be as profitable a profession as it is today. But as RMS himself will say (with paraphrasing) just because book writing is not very profitable does not condemn you to write books. If writing books won't put food on your table, then perhaps you better find some other profession. On the other hand...
      5. Some Joe will discover a hidden talent in writing. It is so easy to publish an open book, (put a copy on the net while he is creating it) that many bored and talented individuals may just give it a try. Publishers may just discover the next Stephen King, Richard Feynmann and Donald Knuth this way! It could even be you!
  • In a number of comments so far, Bruce has asked that people register their Open Source books at Creative Commons [creativecommons.org].

    So I went there to register The ZooLib Cookbook [goingware.com], but found that they only provide for registration of books licensed under one of the licenses that they themselves publish.

    The ZooLib Cookbook is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, so I can't register it there. I really don't want to change the license just to register my book.

    Bruce, may I suggest you recommend to people that they register at The Assayer [theassayer.org] instead?

    The Assayer also allows readers to post reviews.

    And perhaps you could lobby the folks at the creative commons to allow the registration of books on their site that are under other licenses, as long as the licenses are compatible with their aims.

  • Bruce Perens - The biggest karma whore ever? (Score:3, Funny)

    by tmasssey ( 546878 ) on Monday January 06, 2003 @01:07AM (#5023710) Homepage Journal
    Wow! I've never seen someone respond so much to a topic they were related to, and get so much karma because of it. Share the wealth, buddy! :)

    Actually, it's nice to see someone so personally involved: with his own projects, the community in general, and with individuals. If the content of these books are competitive, they will definitely move to the front of my buying list.

  • Reference vs. Introductory (Score:5, Informative)

    by Trolling4Dollars ( 627073 ) on Monday January 06, 2003 @02:25AM (#5023949) Journal
    What I've noticed when I buy dead tree books is that I get much more value out of the books that can be used as reference tools. Typically these are books that touch on subjects that aren't quickly moving targets. For example, I recently bought an O'Reilly book on Bash at a used book store. The book isn't 100% up to date (1999 I believe), but it has helped me move a long way in my Bash scripting and is still very relevant. It's a great reference book. However, I also bought a book that explained what W.I.N.E. is and provided some usage examples at about the same time. Unfortunately, that book is incredibly out of date now and since it was also published in 1999. At this point, it's just s brick. (The W.I.N.E. project changed the way the config files work, so this book is really useless as a reference book)

    With that said, I'd like to point out that if these books are expected to sell as dead tree items, they should probably be more "reference" books than introductory books and probably deal with subject matter that changes slowly over time. The addition of the electronic version makes it relatively easy to keep THAT version up to date, but it doesn't help the owners of the dead tree version when they are not able to access the Internet.

    As an aside, I'd also like to point out the electronic books might benefit from being on CD-RW as opposed to CD-R. Considering that CD-RWs are pretty ubiquitous these days, a dead tree book could come with the book in electronic format on a CD-RW. That way, a user could keep their electronic version up to date by running an "updater" program that would check for the latest version, open the disc for writing, add changes to the disc, and then close the session to make it readable again. THAT would add enough value to the dead tree version that I think people would be kept interested in all three approaches: Paper Book, Online Version, and CD-RW distributed with book. The only reason people don't typically care about included CDs is that they become irrelevant VERY quickly. Just a thought.

  • Browsing this thread at +3 or more is kinda funny (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday January 06, 2003 @04:30AM (#5024185) Homepage
    It looks like an article about Bruce Perens, commented by Bruce Perens and almost nobody else. Any karma you'd like to burn off, I think now is the time. After this article you should have enough to go around.

    Kjella

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