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

Novel Concept, But Not the First

[CBNobi]

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.

Open Source?

[Quaoar]

Does that mean I get to rewrite who won the civil war in my history book? SCORE!

Copyleft is important.

[bcrowell]

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.

This is perfect

[RainbowSix]

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 :)

Re:Good thing I'm not in charge of PR though!

[jbolden]

How would they do that. 1000 pages at $.04 / page = $40. Throw in binding costs, plus the disadvantage of lower quality... And I'll tell most libraries aren't getting $.04 a page after equipment, labor, consumables.

Its very hard to beat the economics of a webpress.

Re:Oreilly / MySQL Reference Manual

[Bruce Perens]

Please don't think in any way that I'm trying to detract or slam your new project.

Of course not. The goal here is to get good documentation into Open Source, which is something we have had a problem with so far. The more of it, the better, wherever it comes from.

And you don't have to be "honored", I'm just a fat old guy who posts on Slashdot.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Nice title

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:why do I suspect

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:Don't forget

[Bruce Perens]

Don't worry. They wanted me on board for credibility. That would lose it for them.

Bruce

Re:Ripping off college students one edition at a t

[Bruce Perens]

Well, the instructors can actually customize the books for their own courses, although they will have to comply with the OPL terms when they do it.

Bruce

Re:Perens' vs Safari

[Bruce Perens]

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.

Re:My prediction...

[AntiFreeze]

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?