Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
When we put the books online, there will be an "ask bruce" on the site.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
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.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
>>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!
Really. It's my first year, second semester (well, that's misleading; officially it's my fourth, so I'm taking higher level stuff than your typical second semester person) at Penn State and I'll be paying ~$450 for ALL USED books. Outrageous, especially considering that tuition+room&board+fees for me is little over $1000/semester.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
You might find this thread about purchasing used textbooks from England at a substantial savings to be helpful:
Tip on buying textbooks...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
Bruce Perens.
Yes they will. If they value their time and the book enough. Even if a laser printed copy of a downloadable is cheaper by a few dollars from the press-printed book, I strongly believe that most people would still go for the convenience and quality of the latter. Why?
Well, 10 dollars is certainly worth much less than the time that I have to spend printing, collating and having the book bound professionally. I would rather pay the extra ten bucks and avoid the aggravation. So, yes, there will be a market for open books for as long as the value of the book is much greater than the cost of buying it.
As I see it, open books will revolutionize the industry in the following way.
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
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
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