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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."
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
Baen is another publisher that has put books out for free on the internet for downloading.
http://www.baen.com/library/
The copyright page says it's OPL licensed, although there is a bug in the copyright page which I will fix in the electronic version, because someone didn't understand the OPL when putting together the copyright page. It goes to the trouble to say that you can use it under the OPL, and then after that says "no copying". Duh!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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!
When we put the books online, there will be an "ask bruce" on the site.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
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!
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
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?
Actually, it is quite possible that online availability can increase sales revenue. Most writers are caught in a catch-22. They can't sell books without a reputation and they can't get a reputation unless people buy their books. The ability to "try before you buy" has offers an oportunity to expand the market. I know that I never make a book purchase without reading the introduction, index, and a key chapter in its entirety (thank goodness for bookstores with coffee shops.)
I suppose that cost is a matter of comparison. I spent $60 last year creating a low-quality bound copy of a class reading packet of $40 pages.
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.
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
Per-page cost may be a little lower than that. I usually pick up computerish titles at Costco or Sam's Club, where they go for about half of cover price, and I doubt if anyone is taking a loss along the way. The average 800 page brick thus goes for somewhere around $25. IIRC the hardcover of Upgrading & Repairing PCs (1530 pages plus a CDROM) was $29 at Sam's Club, tho the cover price is $55.
I both buy hardcopy and download ebooks, largely depending on what I happened to trip over, but the end result is that I'm likely to wind up with both ebook and treebook of most titles. An ebook can encourage me to buy a hardcopy, or other titles from the same publisher, but it won't *prevent* me from buying hardcopy. Ebooks are great for searching and for extracting quotes, but nothing beats hardcopy for multiple bookmarks, margin notes, and for flipping between several sections at once.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Bruce,
Will they charge for the digital version, or will that version be free?
Also, if a title has poor hardcopy sales but good e-circulation, maybe it was because no one knew what to expect ... so perhaps an updated edition would sell, because by then everyone would know it was worthwhile.
If updated editions didn't sell, I wouldn't have 4 different deadtree editions of Upgrading & Repairing PCs (plus whatever are on the included CDs).. not to mention that I'll pick up another one in the next edition or so.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
*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!
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
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?
-
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
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
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.
Well since these books will be open-source you could convert them to any format you like, most pda's are able to display text and probably html too
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
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.
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?
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
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
So if I understand you correctly it's simply a requirement that proofreaders and layouters (yes it's a word, I just created it) can use msword to do their work. Then the author should be free to create the text in any format that can be converted to something msword can open when he hands it over to the publisher?
If I were to write a book (I won't because I haven't the knowledge to write one yet) I would avoid word if at all possible, I've had to read a 400+ page document in word and its not a suitable tool once the text becomes that long (newer versions may be better though, I haven't tried)
And there is ofcourse the issue that a lot of potential opensource writers can't or will refuse to run word on their systems
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
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)