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: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: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