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Prentice Hall To Publish Open Content Licensed Books
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."
I'll be the one amount the first to buy the books.
The Microsoft Press will be pissed about this. "Open Source books will be the death of the industry!"
Bruce Eckel's been releasing his programming books electronically 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.
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.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
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...
lug all my books home every day. I can see it now..."Open source may provide treatment for back pain"
>>This is a tremendous departure for a mainstream publisher.
ORA 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.
Huh?
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Considering that I intended to say adds weight AGAINST the argument that the availability of free digital content precludes sales.
What I was trying to say is that if this stuff sells, especially after the electronic versions are out, it would refute those who argue that easily accessible free versions of commercial goods damages their sales.
As much as I would like to see this succeed, I suspect that many people and most libraries would just print and bind their own copy for a fraction of the cost of a hardcover ($49!). Good things for libraries and students though, for sure.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
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.
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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"?
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Does that mean I get to rewrite who won the civil war in my history book? SCORE!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
He doesn't write them, he doesn't publish them, he just takes a piece of the action, and gives himself some more publicity.
Listen, it's hard enough to succeed as an author. Works that aren't publishable still won't be published - believe me, reducing the earning lifespan of the books with make Prentice Hall more selective, not less - and even those authors that do get published will lose royalties to pay Perens.
If you want to write and then give it away, you don't need this Perens to do that. And if you are good enough to get published, don't give Perens any of your hard-earned money.
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.
Find free books.
Linux Device Drivers (O'Reilly), 2nd Edition is also available online atl
http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/index.htm
'cause you can't grep dead trees.
Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition from O'Reilly is available online atl
http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/index.htm
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/. 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...
Buy Text Processing in Python
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...
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 seconds.. *sigh*
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
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
A lot of computer books are already quite expensive and I can see them becoming even more expensive with this model - the lost sales revenue is going to be made up somewhere, right?
Also, what is the exposure going to be? I highly doubt B&N is going to be placing a link next to these titles saying "Oh, by the way, you can download this $60 book for free right here...but please buy it from us anyway." Will information about obtaining a softcopy be prominent in the books? What format are the books going to be released in - text, Acrobat?
or at the very least remove all the foo formatting crap. None of that is necessary or essential to the document!
Thx for the link, I'll check into it when I get the time.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
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!
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
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.
$30 soft cover would be OK.
For me to spend $50 the book must be very useful and well written or required for a course.
I would even pay $20 for the download version if it wasnt full of DRM crap and allowed me to print and bind my own copy.
I actually prefer spiral bining that kinkos will do for a few bucks. -- You dont have to break the binding to make it lay FLAT on the desk.
Baen is another publisher that has put books out for free on the internet for downloading.
http://www.baen.com/library/
"Ask Bruce Perens" section, or icon for Bruce. :)
Nice move Bruce. Do you think they'd publish opensource book for other languages, like this one? Can I submit those opensource document even I'm not the author, provided that we credit where its due?
Also of note, the XForms book I'm writing for O'Reilly will be published under the GFDL.
.micah
Before publication, the text-in-progress is also available, but under a somewhat more restrictive license, at http://dubinko.info/writing/xforms/.
This policy at O'Reilly dates back to at least May 2002, when I signed the contract.
--- Learn XForms today: http://xformsinstitute.com
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!
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
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.
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.
College students are NOT a population that anyone should expect to fund this experiment.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
That's what this is about, and nothing else. Oh, except the money that goes in your pocket, of course.
Hopefully they won't "forget" to release it as Open and then say Oh sorry, like some past publishers have.
You might have read the note on Mr. Peren's web-site saying it was a PH idea to name the series after him.
Hmmm... how did you get modded up? By moderators who also hadn't read the note:)
Bill
Upon seeing the box was too small, Schrodinger's Elephant breathed a sigh of relief.
It's about balance. Do it all the time and you're right. Do it not at all and you don't have a heart. Getting computer experts to write free books is a good idea.
I contribute to OSS in my spare time because I have time to get it right and write great code. I love being on the mailing lists and talking to others about this guff. Writing a book however is a solitary experience. There is a crummy publisher who gets an individual author to write each chapter (they produce books in a few weeks)... can anyone think of a collaborative and distributed model for writing?
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.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I like the model, since I prefer to read paper, but like the electronic version for reference.
I think the submitter is on to something here. Real books still beat e-books for actual reading. However, trying to find a specific fact can be pretty difficult, even with keyword searching (also known as "the index") and directory searching (also known as "the table of contents"). Having an electronic version and paper version of every coursebook I had in college would have been a godsend for me.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Thanks to Bruce Perens and the others involved in this. I hope they succeed and I'll be buying the books.
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.
can anyone think of a collaborative and distributed model for writing?
CVS?
You'd need a 'book maintainer', I suppose, to do editing and fact checking and whatever else needs a single person's decision, and you could accept 'patches' on the book's text.
Us spelling/grammar nazis could finally make our corrections quietly, efficiently, AND get some credit for a change.
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.
Valete!
While Bruce Momjian was in the process of writing a book on PostgreSQL he (or somebody) released one or more PDFs of a draft version. The PDF was pulled before publishing, but I of course kept a copy. I personally purchased a copy of his book and so did my brother. I use the PDF for reference regularly but even my 17" LCD can't appease my eyes for lengthy reading (when I was actually trying to learn the subject). I'd guess that titles that are not strictly reference material would net a negligible loss, if at all. This dual medium availability will definately influence my purchasing decisions.
in any form that can be at least "ripped" to ASCII by an open source tool we'll be alright.
.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.
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
KFG
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
Find free books.
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 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/.
Thank you for your attention.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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?
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
Prentice Hall is counting on people buying the books even though the electronic version will be freely available later.
HAHAHAHAHA. Guess what, people that would read these books are free-loaders. You won't see a penny in sales. Big surprise.
I generally can not read an 'e-book' for more than 30 minutes before my eyes getting droopy. This is exactly why I love buying books that come with an electronic version ... I can use it for searching up small things while reading the book for instruction. This model makes perfect sense and is a breath of fresh air from the ever-so-closing publishing companies!
This also might spark better translations; It's costly (and risky) to translate a book into another language while it's easy to post a new translated book on the net.
. . . anyone who would rather format hundreds of pages for printing in book format and handily bind them than shelve out 10 bucks for the hardcopy.
So I went there to register The ZooLib Cookbook, 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 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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The only reason they're daring to do this is the fact that paper books have added value over their electronically-stored equivalents. If book-printers, croppers and automatic binders were standard equipment on a PC as CD- and DVD-R drives now are, you can bet they wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole. This isn't a demonstration of open-mindedness (the added value guarantees niche appeal, it's no risk and no philosophical statement), and it for-damn-sure isn't a demonstration of how information can be open-sourced without making information publishers obsolete, since the publication type is already archaic (According to Gallup in 2000, about 17% of US citizens read newspapers, half of half of that read books).
Crow about this if you want, but I don't see how this is important, or even newsworthy. OSS advocates have long known - or should have known, anyway - that 'added value' is the magic phrase for profiting on open source work. What remains to be seen is if any profit can be made from open sourced information when adding value of significance (enough to make a consumer consume despite the free nature of the content) is difficult or impossible. Not surprising, considering that, when reduced, it's really a paradoxical situation at heart. Added value is only necessary when the real value is not salable. If security through obscurity is a bad motto, how is the mantra of added value any different?
Oh, well. Have your party.
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.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
Bruce,
Will they charge for the digital version, or will that version be free?
*looks up*
You are freakin kidding me.
Of COURSE it has been done before, yeesh. There have been countless Science Fiction collaborative projects. Collaborative worlds, stories, books, essays, you name it.
Many Bulletin Board Systems also had a "Never Ending Story" thread or board where each user in turn added X paragraphs to the story. Heck the "pass the paper around" methodology is darn nearly a cliche within writing classes!
There are also many stories of professional authors going over the script of young but highly creative writers and doing collaborative works with them. One could say that John Campbell's editing style was pretty much a collaborative one.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I wonder if it is possible to get an open e-book reader? Perhaps the good ppl at transmeta would like to come up with a design, perhaps similar to the Newton. Keep it simple and keep it cheap. Backlighting, cheap on energy, and size of paperback would go a long way. I wonder if the indian pda would work for this?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I see links people are posting here from OReilly, Bruce Eckel, "Text Processing in Python", "Linux Device Drivers", etc. All freely available books. However finding free books is not exactly easy.
Anyone know of a centralized location of all these books? I think that would be a great project for someone out there - Centralize links or mirror these books so people know where to go to find them.
Yes, I know this is off-topic, but I was so flabbergasted after seeing this that I have to mention it. Ralph Nader's new book (Crashing the Party) is available in 3 formats on Amazon.
Hard-cover - $17.47
Soft-cover - $10.47
Digital - $24.95 (requires MS reader, can't be printed, Palm not supported)
Can someone please explain to me how this can be possible? And people wonder why ebooks aren't getting much mainstream attention.
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.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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.
Un-news
*Despite being 34 years old and showing examples in IBM-360 Basic Assembly Language and some weird mnemonics called FLAP, it's actually quite useful.
I typically prefer electronic versions of programming language references as opposed to hard-copy, primarily because I don't need yet another typically hundred page "imagine you're computer is a big forest ..." type of introduction (that is, introduction to programming as well as an introduction to using a computer, just for good measure.) However, it appears that this series is not focused on these types of books, so all is well again.
Pete
You fucken freeloader. Fuck off and choke.
Went to Mr. Peren's site and saw this...
Employment
Hewlett-Packard Corporation - 2000 to 2002
Senior strategist, Linux and Open Source. I was the first Open Source evangelist to gain a role in top management of a multi- Billion-dollar corporation. On the org chart there were only three people between me and the CEO - a general manager, a vice president, and a president. Among my assignments was to challenge HP management. It was a great job, but when the HP- Compaq merger replaced the HP Linux management with Compaq folks, I was terminated.
All the more reason NOT to use HP products....
an electronic format, straight from the publisher, will be great for access by the print-disabled. do you know what format they plan to use?
to bruce for replying to all these comments here. I noticed this post go up a few hours ago and he's still replying. how's that carpal tunnel coming?
-
I have often wondered why schools don't decide to write open source textbooks. textbook licening fees are pretty hefty. it would save cash strapped schools a ton if they could download and custom tailor at book free of charge. some classes would lend themselves to this more than others, but still it would be a good thing if only they were aware of the conept...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I'm with you there; I was very hesitant to click on the link. But don't worry, there's actually a book about Python at that link.
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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Adding another to the list of this-has-been-done-already..
Creating application with Mozilla
Cheers,
kris
How are you going to handle forking of the text? If two different authors both make mods will their versions be merged or left to exist as separate entities? Will there be a CVS (or other source control system) tree of the books?
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Like many here, I read Slashdot a lot (perhaps too much), and it's really nice to see Bruce getting involved with discussions etc.
Although we often see other luminaries mentioned, he is one of the few that takes the time to actually discuss matters he is concerned about. Only the other day, a discussion he was involved with brought comments from Jim Gettys and others that were very enlightening.
Thanks again, Bruce, for your articles and (unlike some of us) your unfailing ability to get to the point, instead of some of the superfluous stuff that appears here.
But you are allowed to charge for the delivery of GPL code. Redhat does this, for example.
Some of the books are a little dated, but some of them are quite useful.
Some other great books I've found on-line are:
The book I think is really needed in the series is a new "Intro to Python" book. "Learning Python" covers Python 1.5 and is so, like, 1990s. Guido's tutorial doesn't cover it either. The "Python: Visual QuickStart Guide" by Chris Fehily is a good replacement for now, but an open book would be better.
My father is a blogger.
Australian Personal Computer (apcmag.com) recently released all of their 2002 issues on pdf on their jan 2003 cover cd. Im pretty stoked, normally back issues cost $8.99 each.
yes, Im cheap..
I've created a C++ Reference Card... but i'm actually selling it. I wasn't happy with the reference cards already available, and I wanted to make one. There is something very good about having a paper copy of something, or in this case a laminated paper copy. eBooks are nice, but any book that you can actually hold and flip through is much easier to use than something on the computer screen.
There are other open source reference cards out there as well.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
A personal e-mail for someone making snide comments at his expense? I'm impressed... If he puts anywhere near as much effort into these books, I'm sure they will be a success.
And I just became Mr. Perens' friend.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
And it jumped off the shelves, despite substantial competition.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Writing a book is (in many ways) akin to developing a large software project. It requires the skill to work in the trenches as well as at 1E4 feet and still see how everything hangs together. The difference between developing software and writing a book is that in the latter case, everyone reads your source code. If you're writing a spreadsheet application and it passes all the unit and functional tests, it doesn't matter if it's pure spaghetti code (ignoring factors like maintainability, scalability, cost-of-ownership, etc.) The purpose of the app is number-crunching. The purpose of a book is to transmit information. However, the clarity of the "code" is integral to fulfilling this function. A book doesn't have unit tests and functional tests to validate its success. It only has usability tests.
My experience comes from both sides of the fence. I've been a software architect for a Fortune 500 corporation and I was the acquisitions editor (and part-time developmental editor) for a technical publishing company. As an acquisitions editor I realised pretty soon that a large percentage of technical people look at writing as a brain dump. These are people who would never dream of sitting down to code without, at the very least, sketching out some designs on an index card. But they feel perfectly comfortable sitting down to write chapter one with a blank page and no notes and expecting to finish 450 pages later. As you might expect, most of these books were either never completed or were unpublishable. (This is probably what you'd expect if a software project were managed the same way.)
My question for you, Bruce, is this -- what kind of editorial support will PH be offering? Is this just going to be documentation that is bound and offered for sale? Or will there be an editorial process that help prevent these books from being more than a brain dump (which, IMHO, is about as intelligible as a core dump).
Cheers,
Alex
I strongly respect Bruce's efforts, thinking this is an excellent approach to publishing, and do not intend this remark to diminish that effort in any way at all. Nor do I want to diminish P-H's contributions to technology -- P-H has been excellent with their technology books in the past, agreeing freely to publish one of my books in electronic form at no cost, substantially as they are doing for Bruce.
However, shouldn't we be somewhat more jealous how the term "Open Source" is used? Is this really open source in any meaningful way? Will I be able to use, make derivative works and republish from Bruce's book in any manner , or am I just being given a copy for personal use?
In short, docs are different from programs in several important ways, a point that many anti-copyright people repeatedly made in the past with respect to the copyright act being applied to software. Likewise, the needs for "open source" for code is fundamentally different from the utility of "open access" to text. All of this is different from freedom, as used by RMS and crew, which is a different thing altogether.
In short, are we confusing our message by using the terminology "open source" with respect to media and content that (1) doesn't have source; and (2) is distributed under terms quite different from OSI code?
Many good things come in different packages: (1) the harvard group's collaborative on-line brief-writing efforst; and (2) various "freer" versions of publishing. That I suggest we don't lend the term open source does not mean that I don't think they are as good or less good than open source software. but they are different, and we shouldn't confuse or diminish our mission.
The 2001 Sams book KDE 2 Development was published with a licence called "Open Publication."
Seems to me if these books become popular, another publisher can simply ride the coat tails of the original publisher. That is, print an identical copy, which should cost no more, and sell it slightly cheaper since no royalties need to be paid to the author and the promotional costs have already been taken care of by the original publisher.
Vote for Pedro
I hate to break it to you, I wasn't looking for +1 Funny this time... the parent post was serious.
This open-source "donation" is coming at the expense of the college student's textbook resale value... are we sure we want to cheer at this?
I am pretty sure the GNU Emacs Manual on my bookshelf (mine is Sixth Edition, Version 18 March 1987) costs money. Yep, the order form in the back says I can order it for $10. And the GNU Emacs source on 1600bpi industry standard magnetic tape in tar format for $150. But that's from the June 1988 price list.
The FSF now sells a distribution of all the GNU source code for $345 to organizations or $85 to individuals. The Emacs manual, 15th edition for Emacs 21, costs $45.
Sure, the price increase is quite a bit more than inflation, but as Emacs gets bigger, the documentation also must grow to cover the new features. And not only do you get the full source for all GNU programs from a trusted source (Free Software Foundation Inc.) through a trusted channel (a well-known shipping company), making the distribution extremely hard to spoof, but you also help support the development of the free GNU/* operating system.
Will I retire or break 10K?
From the material at that URL, it would appear that these books are open content but not open source. The error appears to be slash-dot's rather than the authors.
That is unfortunate, because a true open source book would be easier to mark up and enhance.
The reason why it's hard to convert from something else to .doc is that most of the upfront stuff is done in MS Word. This is beginning to change some, but it's still not feasible to do it the other way. For example, you can't always expect a copy editor with a strong english background to be an expert at dealing with various file formats, and technologies needed to accomidate them (i.e. Word tracks revisions, not too many English majors can use CVS to track docbook files.) Exceptions are made, and of course we've allowed authors to use StarOffice/OpenOffice for a while too.
As for printing existing OpenSourced books... That's difficult due to the licensing and copyright things. Keep in mind that Publishiers *are* in business to make money and there *very* big risks in publishing some OpenSourced content. If however there's money to be made, or at least some evidence that it wouldn't be a money loosing proposition, Then it's certainly possible.
--- Nothing To See Here ---
From Bruce's website: They named the book series after me - it's "Bruce Perens' Open Source Series". I suppose they're trying to make me into the Peter Norton of Linux :-)
Linux isn't the only thing open source...
-yb
At the moment, I'm reading the 3rd book in the Honor series on my palm. On this boat, there's plenty of electricity to charge my Handspring Edge but no weight allowance for books. Books melt in this hot, wet weather, anyway...
:) the internal light lasts at least all night. It automatically starts back where I shut it off
.prc versions of the Baen books have a lot of imbedded html that took getting used to. I wonder if I d/led them incorrectly, somehow.
I can read the palm anywhere, anytime. It's 1-handed, readable in the dark and automatically keeps my place. Always gotta hang onto something and the paper versions of these books are rather thick. In the dark of the bunk or on deck (but not when steering
I've d/led at least 7 of the books onto the laptop before we left shore. I can load 3 on the Edge at a time easily. There's still room in there for the CelestNav s/w and a running log.Oh yea, and ShinsenSho.I will mention the
Don't ever intend to buy the books; I learned about the series at the local public library.
What you need to do is put the electronic version online before or concurrently with the print version. See [several examples]
I like this scheme - for a while, as an experiment. Just think...
If you see a sudden jump in sales of the hardcopy book when the e-version comes out, it immediately discredits the theory that free softcopies (or even so-called "piracy") REDUCE the total sales of the hardcopy version by replacing more hardcopy sales than they generate.
So if we and Jim Baen are right, that free softcopy availablity INCREASES hardcopy sales, Bruce and Prentice Hall are doing us all a GREAT service by foregoing a little profit to prove it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Free Software Foundation keeps a list of free books available -- please submit your books to them by emailing <free-books@gnu.org> I'm also going to see if we can start listing books with other licenses on the Creative Commons site.
And your point? People will still buy the original makers version. This practice has been done for a long time. Look at pharmacy drugs. People still buy Tylenol even though they can buy generic drugs that have acetaminophen (the active drug in Tylenol) for way less. There hundres and thousands of other drug examples as well as other non-drug related.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
My point is the author and original publisher get screwed, lowering the incentive to write and publish new works. This is a bad thing. IN the case of patents, they limit them since no invention is built from nothing. A book or film however, is a unique work which deserve protection.
Vote for Pedro
Maybe not you but it's pritty good advertising to just be published.
Oh hell yeah I'd write a book (science fantacy) if I thought it'd be published. I'd forfit proffit even. Just get the name out.
I take that back. I would never get rich writing fiction...
assuming I could get published..
I don't actually exist.
So do you feel this is true?
1 copied cd/dvd/book = 1 lost sale?
And you still havn't mentioned *what* is being stolen?
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to
get results.
The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy
problems in order to get results.
The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at
toy problems in order to get results.
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