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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.
lug all my books home every day. I can see it now..."Open source may provide treatment for back pain"
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Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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