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*