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."

Comments

In general, Slashdot is a nasty place...

[herojig]

This forum is somewhat unique, in the sense that by reading the posts everyday for several months, I get the impression this is a very nasty place. Slashdot has good pointers to important issues (but not all that original), and the aggregate of comments are conflicting on any given topic. In this case, it seems that there is a general consensus that people oppose organized efforts to enforce copyright on music and movies, but also oppose an individual artist who actually tries to do something about it. Add the "Care and Feeding" post on almost every thread, and the appearance of a nasty place is enforced. Still, I just gotta vistit here everyday:)