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

_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: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: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: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: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.

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.