Slashdot Mirror
Author Encourages Users to Pirate His Book
mariushm writes "Peter Cooper, the author of Beginning Ruby, breaks down how he gets paid for the book, including the advance and royalties, giving a nice clean explanation of how authors get paid for their books. He also describes the negotiations over the second edition of the book, in which he begged his publisher, Apress, to offer the ebook version for free, believing (strongly) that it would promote sales of the paper book. He even notes that the original version's ebook barely had noteworthy sales, so it seemed reasonable to offer up the ebook for free to drive more attention. No dice. Even though Apress has done that with other similar titles, it wouldn't agree. As he retains the copyright for the actual text, he encourages people to buy the book and create an online version of it without covers, contents table and indexes, promising not to enforce his copyright over the new work."
Surely the publisher provided an editor to clean up the manuscript before publication, thus putting the copyright clearly in the hands of someone besides the author alone.
He most likely granted the publisher an exclusive license.
On one hand, the author himself, who was there for the signing of the contract, states he did not give them an exclusive license on the text, but states he didn't create the covers, toc, or index thus can't give permission to copy that.
On the other hand, someone on slashdot states what the author _most likely_ did, in their overly well informed opinion.
Well that settles it!
Actually I sorta like that idea.
Personally, I think he most likely never even spoke to a book publisher, and not only wants his book to be free, but will pay us to read it! I'm sure that is the case.
*Goes off to download an ebook and wait for my check in the mail*
He may not have, but Eric Flint has.
http://www.baen.com/library/
Exerpt:
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
On one hand, the author himself, who was there for the signing of the contract, states he did not give them an exclusive license on the text, but states he didn't create the covers, toc, or index thus can't give permission to copy that.
That's not what the author stated. He actually wrote:
My contract also states that I have exclusively allowed Apress to publish and reproduce my content.
He then went on about how he "suspects" that you can make a PDF without the cover, TOC and index without infringing any of the publisher's rights.
Tim O'Reilly, who (I'd guess) is very experienced with these kinds of contracts, wrote this in the comments of his post:
I’d be very careful with your assumptions here. “Owning the copyright” doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. I haven’t seen the language in the APress contract, but I suspect it says something to the effect that you grant them the exclusive right to publish, distribute, and sell (etc.) the book for the duration of the copyright. If this is so, the ONLY thing that you get from still owning the copyright is the ability to reacquire the rights in the event APress goes out of business.
So while we can't know without seeing the author's contract, it's reasonable to assume that what alain94040 wrote above is closer to the truth than what the author "suspects".
I wrote the piece linked here and the summary on Slashdot is laughably wrong. All the cool Hacker News and Reddit people who read the story.. you're awesome and you really added to the discussion and didn't come out with nonsense saying I'm actively encouraging people to break the law (which, if whoever wrote the summary could comprehend English, is not what I said - I raised a potential method of circumvention as a thought experiment.. "I suspect" does not mean "I think you must").
So if Slashdotters want to be the first to spout nonsense and misquotes on the same day my first kid was born (I'm just getting a few hours sleep after being up a gazillion hours ;-)) then congratulations - some of you succeeded admirably. All the traffic to the site is going to somewhere you can donate to a good cause and earn some actual karma.