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."

Comments

Oreilly / MySQL Reference Manual

[wideBlueSkies]

>>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.

Re:Oreilly / MySQL Reference Manual

[Bruce Perens]

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

Linux Device Drivers (O'Reilly), 2nd Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux Device Drivers (O'Reilly), 2nd Edition is also available online at
http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/index.html

_Text Processing in Python_ almost under model

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

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...

Re:Assuming the quality of the titles...

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:Nice title

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:Proof reading!

[Bruce Perens]

Dan Gilmore pointed that out to me, and we are getting after Barnes and Noble about it. Somebody must be typing really fast! We think it might have happened at the wholesaler, who sends data batches to the bookstores.

Bruce

Re:Astronomy

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:There should have

[Bruce Perens]

I would like to hear from translators who want to produce Open Source books and make a little money too.

When we put the books online, there will be an "ask bruce" on the site.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Novel Concept, But Not the First

[Bruce Perens]

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

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:A note about the license

[Bruce Perens]

Whatever we can convert the .doc file into. Yes, Prentice PTR is still a .doc file shop. I think the XML format used by OpenOffice might be best. I have used OpenOffice to read the books.

Bruce

Re:Open Source?

[Bruce Perens]

I think the best example of how this is handled is Wikipedia. That project is AWESOME! They have written a whole darned encyclopedia as Free Software (under the GNU FDL), the level of scholarship is high, and it is coming up a lot on google of late because their page ranking is now very high. This means it is answering questions for a lot of "real" people, not just Free Software developers :-).

They seem to have a meta-discussion process for handling argument, but I haven't looked very deeply into it. They get stuff done.

Bruce

Redefine the history of the civil war

[Bruce Perens]

Yes, the link here will let you do just that.

Bruce

Re:Copyleft is important.

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:Novel Concept, But Not the First

[bcrowell]

Here 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!

Re:This will work for technical titles

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You might find this thread about purchasing used textbooks from England at a substantial savings to be helpful:

Tip on buying textbooks...

Re:Novel Concept, But Not the First

[bcrowell]

I believe 'Open Starch Press' releases some open source books.
Do you mean No Starch Press? I poked around their web site briefly, but couldn't find anything but a book that had one free chapter. Do you know of any of their titles in particular that are free?

and whoever published the first book on using Gimp
Yes, Grokking the Gimp is published by New Riders. They have quite a few free books in their catalog. Some of them are really good (e.g., Grokking the Gimp), while others have, mmm, shall we say... low production values :-)

Also those books with the black shiny covers... 'Orilios' I think may be the publisher
You mean Coriolis? Do you know of any of their titles that are free?

print on demand

[bcrowell]

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:Bigger Implications...

[Bruce Perens]

Well, Prentice Hall PTR is not the division that makes text books. PTR makes technical books. One victory at a time, and that next one might be a good deal more difficult. But it's already happening at the colleges, rather than the publishers.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:My prediction...

[Bruce Perens]

I did a list a while back, and it turned out that my authors are more in touch with new stuff than I am. For example, I think I might have mentioned intrusion detection, but didn't put Snort on the list. I would rather that you think about what you have invested your time in, and what special areas you can contribute to. Is there an area you currently have expertise in where the rest of the world would profit from a brain-dump?

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Finally, I don't have to...

[Bruce Perens]

Note that Prentice Hall PTR is the technical book, not text book division.

Bruce

Re:My prediction...

[Robotech_Master]

What you need to do is put the electronic version online before or concurrently with the print version. See the Baen Free Library, Baen Webscriptions, and the Honor Harrington CD-ROM (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:This is perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an electronic version of the Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy here: http://www.h2g2.com/. It's rather good!

Reference vs. Introductory

[Trolling4Dollars]

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.

O'Reilly's Open Books Project

[Big Sean O]

O'Reilly does release out-of-print books (and selected other books), like the DocBook definitive guide, under their Open Books Project.

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:

• Grokking The Gimp
  
• Vi IMproved - Vim
  
• Karl Vogel's Open Source Development with CVS
  
• Thinking In Java
  

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.

Re:My prediction...

[ChaosDiscord]

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 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, if only "Prime Palaver" articles in which the person manging the library discusses the plan and the actual results. It's very enlightening.