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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."
I have dealt quite a bit with copyright law when creating FairSoftware's virtual company license. I'm afraid the author is incorrect when he says that he retains copyright, therefore he can authorize people to download his book for free. He most likely granted the publisher an exclusive license. The whole point of the word exclusive is to say that although you are the author, you can't give the text to anyone else anymore, once you signed the book deal.
That being said, this is a great blog post for everyone who ever wondered how tech book deals work. He is making about $2 per sale of a $40 book! So there's a great debate about whether to go with an editor which will take a much lower cut, but will also not be so good at promoting the book. At least someone is making money from publishing content related to open source technology :-)
There are even links on Twitter to torrents like this. I am happy for you to pirate my book, but I’m NOT A LAWYER, and I can’t guarantee what Apress would do about it – so you’d be doing it off your own back! So, uhm, don’t pirate it?
So he's covered his own ass and recognized that Apress will most likely not see things his way. Now, to do what the summary suggests is confusing to me. I don't know his contract with Apress but I must question why, if he is so upset with Apress, he isn't just releasing an HTML version of his work online. Surely he must have the source documents he wrote to write the book, correct? Then why doesn't he simply make his own HTML plain text version and host it.
The answer is painfully simple. He's reached an agreement with Apress for digital distribution rights making them the only possible channel for distribution. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a default contract for them. Regardless, downloading the Apress version on RapidShare is copyright violation with Apress, regardless of what the author says. There's no question of that.
If I've misjudged Peter Cooper's character, I truly am sorry but he is either willfully or through ignorance putting you at risk with these suggestions. Do not follow through.
My work here is dung.
"Steal this book"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book
"Feel free to pirate my book...free of chaaarrrge."
put an order form for a self-published book on your site. the self-publishing business is well-established and straightforward
end of story
no need for a publisher and all that legal cruft
you'll make more money than going the publisher route, even with all the barnes and noble exposure. people are getting information about programming via internet searches, not browsing barnes and noble. hell, people are getting information about composting, travelling to ecuador, whooping cough, and everything else online. you are not giving exposure by not being in barnes and noble
and if you think not getting a toehold in barnes and noble means less income, you are correct. except that free and unfettered access online represents far more exposure than barnes and noble. and you get that exposure by being unbound from all the legal cruft of a publisher. such that anyone choosing to buy a book anyways from you online represents more people than buying it at barnes and noble
lose the publisher, get more exposure and get more cash
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is that you?
It is not immoral to steal from the Pig Empire?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book
Sorry my friend! Theft is not justified by a feeling of moral superiority on the part of the thief. This is, after all, how the became pigs, in the first place!
"But to live outside the law,
You must be honest"
-- Bob Dylan, Sweet Marie
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I hope he enjoyed the advances and royalties 'cause he won't be getting another book deal. Doofus
...on the post is pretty interesting. Here's an excerpt:
He goes on to discuss the hassle of shipping, returns, credit card processing, storing the books, etc. All true, all good stuff.
For what it's worth, going through a small local publisher with my JavaCC book has worked out pretty well. We did a much smaller print run - 350 books - so the storage wasn't as much of a hassle. Definitely a niche market, though.
The Army reading list
Whether or not he intended to, Cooper got exactly what he wanted - front page of /. and a ton of publicity for his book. If I were him I'd be very happy right now, regardless of whether his proposition is illegal or not.
I believe Admiral Ackbar stated it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piVnArp9ZE0
Torrent to the indexed version please? Thanks
He's encouraging people to steal from him not the publisher.
He owns the text, the publisher owns the bits they added, cover, index, etc. Apparently he made a deal with them where he retained ownership of the text, and they got an exclusive license.
Maybe he's breaking that deal (eg maybe in court this "promise to not sue" would be viewed as a license or implicit permission), or maybe he's abusing them for not requiring him sign over his ownership.
Is it really "piracy" if the rights-holder gives you permission to reproduce his work?
So is he providing the origional manuscript? Is there even a copy of it before it was sent off to the publisher? You forgot to mention that the publisher edits the book as well.
I prefer to think of Abbie this way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbie_Hoffman#Controversy_at_Woodstock
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
...why doesn't he offer a download himself? That way everybody who downloads it at least comes to his web site and there is no "what if he turns around on his promise not to enforce copyright" doubt in the air.
The book belongs to the publisher, not to him; that's why he had to ask them for permission, to which they said "no".
I cannot imagine why you believe this. No publisher works this way.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Publishers that offer higher rates of royalties tend to do either less promotion or only take on authors who they know have a good record of producing popular books. You'd expect Stephen King for instance to be able to negotiate a better deal than John Smith on his debut novel.
No, you're thinking of patents. Copyright doesn't go "poof" if it isn't enforced.
I've worked for several publishers over the years, and even in cases where the author keeps the copyright, the publishers is usually granted the enforcement rights, and other portions of the rights. For instance, one would not expect an author to be forced to defend his copyright in court.
I looked at a contract that was executed several years ago:
Check the italicized portion:
1.0:called the work, hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher the exclusive world publishing rights of the work including the sole rights to translations, selections, expansions, abridgments, as well as all electronic production and reproduction thereof, and the Publisher agrees and has the exclusive rights to publish or reproduce the work during the continuance of the copyright ...
9.0: That the Author agrees not to publish--or permit to be published without the written consent of the Publisher--any other book on the same subject written or edited by the Author that will injure the market made for this book, nor to publish or cause to be published any other edition of this book revised, corrected, abridged or otherwise without the written consent of the Publisher.
In the case of every publisher I have ever worked with (and from dealing with hundreds of authors), this has literally NEVER been an issue -- the author requests rights back from the publisher, and he or she gets them 99% of the time. Literally, I don't think I've ever heard of a case of a publisher not following the author's wishes (and I've dealt with a number of authors who were switching publishers with a revised/second/third/fourth/etc edition of their book).
Speaking as a someone with experience in the small academic publishing world, publishers take big risks with signing authors and issuing advances. If the books never materialize, there's actually very little most publishers can do. ie, you have to eat the 10k or whatever, as any law suit would be expensive and uncertain. Thus the extreme legalese.
A few points from the article:
The retail price (RRP) of Beginning Ruby is $40 (give or take a penny) but my publisher, Apress, makes a varying amount per book – I don’t know why.
Very simple -- publishers sell books at widely ranging discounts, from a low of about 20% to a single bookstore, to maybe 40% to wholesalers, to maybe 60% to amazon. Yeah, so for that $40 list price on Amazon, Amazon probably only had to pay < $20! (Yeah, publishing really isn't as highly marked up by the publishers as it might seem!!)
(About an advance> The only advantage to you is that if your book bombs and doesn’t even sell enough copies to pay back the advance, you (usually) don’t have to give the publisher back a penny.
I've never heard of authors having to pay their advances back if their books bomb or don't materialize. I'm sure it happens with bigger publishers and bigger advances, but most of the time the publisher can't do much.
On the royalty statements above, you should see references to “Licensed Rights.” My first editor told me that these are payments you receive for foreign versions of your book, for inclusion on systems like O’Reilly Safari, and “similar.” I’ve asked a couple of times now but I’ve never found out what these amounts are specifically for and I’m not aware of any translated editions of Beginning Ruby.
Often times these fees are for translations or rights to use small segments. For instance if a professor wants to use one chapter but not the whole book, that might be a small licensing fee. Or if somebody wanted to translate the book into Macedonian, we might charge them $500, which is split 50/50 between the publisher and the author.
Now, I wasn’t particularly
Oh yes, and my book is still available :-)
My web domain.
I've long been intrigued by the idea of giving the eBook version of my book "Elevator Pitch Essentials" away (no-DRM PDF), but have been reluctant to since I'm actually making decent money via eBook sales.
Maybe part of the difference is that I self published and don't have huge distribution. My books is only available through US Amazon.com and my web site. In a year, I have sold about 80 eBook copies (at $10), mostly overseas or to people who needed it RIGHT NOW (e.g. due to presentations tomorrow). eBook sales are pure profit to me, and roughly twice as profitable as hard copy sales through Amazon.
Of course, I could be making money at the cost of awareness.
pirating. Way to and to the downloading material is a crime.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What the author should have said was that he expressly authorizes the electronic distribution of his work to anyone.
IANAL but I bet his contract with Apress gives Apress exclusive ebook distribution rights... so he can't give that right away.
i can't pirate his book unless i get a boat, find a boat carry his books and then proceed to commit armed robbery.
i think i'd rather just download it, which would be copyright infringement (unless i have permission).
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Just wanted to point out that, coincidentally, Mark Pilgrim's excellent Dive Into Python 3 just became available in print form today: http://diveintopython3.org/. He published Dive Into Python under the GNU Free Documentation license and made it available in a number of formats, and Dive Into Python 3 is available under a Creative Commons license and downloadable in HTML and PDF form. Full copies of both texts can be browsed online. Both are excellent. Interestingly, both were published by Apress.
Why does this link go to some Cancer site, and not take me to the Article... And if they expect me to sign up, then can someone please post the REAL URL? I really want to read this article.
I think you are thinking of trademarks.
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.
Weird, I just got redirected to http://www.cancer.org/docroot/don/don_0.asp, is somebody having this problem too?
Same here. I have no clues, but it's not just you.
The book belongs to the publisher, not to him; that's why he had to ask them for permission, to which they said "no".
No... the publisher owns the cover, the additions they've made, and whatever else the agreement with the author says they own.
Apparently, in this case, the agreement says the author owns the text, and the publisher gets an exclusive license from the author (owner of the text) to utilize the text in the publication.
So the publisher partially owns the book, , but not the book as a whole, and not the text: the author owns the text.
It's not just the article, it's the entire website (beginningruby.org). Probably he didn't want to deal with his site being slashdotted, but redirecting everything to the American Cancer Society website (and possibly slashdotting that) is not necessarily the nicest way to deal with it. I'm not convinced that ACS is going to get a host of new donations just because of a confusing redirect.
After I read the summary and saw this "Apress, to offer the ebook version for free, believing (strongly) that it would promote sales of the paper book.", I had to post just to say I totally agree. I much prefer a paper back copy (and not a loosely bound pile of A4 printouts) for studying material at leisure. Especially when I'm dipping into a new topic and want a good overview rather than the stage where I'm piecing together bits of knowledge from the net.I really like the typesetting and format of the Apress books so after a couple of days of reading through their Pro Drupal and the PHP patterns book via the PDF I decided I really did want these books and went off to pick them up from the bookstore.
Whilst I agree that there are some that always will just take the stuff, for those that can afford it many will buy it if they want it. I'm going to get the PDF anyway from something like ebookee or even google so just give up already and promote it on your site and take the print sales as they come. Those that really want this book will buy it. Fair play to the author.
jaymz
So, you are unhappy with Slashdot's summary and the resulting comments, but instead of emailing the "editors", or writing a post like this one, correcting the inaccuracies as you perceive them, you redirected your site to the American Cancer Society, sending them hits from people who have no intention of going there, thereby costing them wasted bandwidth, and risking slashdotting their servers? Do you think that your pique, or your new-father status justifies that? Maybe your lack of sleep explains it, but it is all in very poor taste, and reflects very poor judgment.
I visited the site http://beginningruby.org/ as well and was redirected to http://www.cancer.org/docroot/don/don_0.asp. I suspected someone has hacked the domain name or web site and redirecting to the cancer.org. You can view the original content by googling the site and checking the cached content.
I think he's just mad at Apress and wants to stick it to the man
I'd say Apress has an air-tight case for breach of contract - and quite possibly something like conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
I would love to be the fly on the wall when Cooper tries to cut a deal for his next book. I can't imagine anyone who would touch it.
This is a good argument for the various on-demand publishers. FWIW, I've got a few APress books, and several books on Ruby. I don't recall *EVER* seeing an ad for his book. So I don't see any reason he should be expected to pay ANYTHING for marketing. I've bought books from LuLu and they did a good job of binding, selling, and shipping. At a *MUCH* lower price in overhead. And I believe the author keeps ALL rights.
Once upon a time there was a reasonable argument for the publishing houses. That time is now well over a decade in the past.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The following comment I'm going to make as someone who's had no experience dealing with publishers or publishing books. But anyway my theory is that to achieve what the author wanted to achieve, he doesn't actually have to offer the free ebook. There's other ways to do it.
There's a couple of reasons people would want an ebook:
Reference copy is easily distributed along with the printed copy (you pay for the book you get access online). And publishers can offer a separate, cheaper price point for just the ebook.
There's a couple of reasons readers might buy the printed copy after having a free ebooks:
If they wanted just a summary, the ebook doesn't have to be a complete copy. It could be like what amazon or google offers, which is a preview of the style of writing, the depth of content, and the table of contents. For most people this should give a sufficient idea whether they want the full book or not.
If they wanted a hard copy, they should just buy that to begin with instead of downloading an ebook and then buying the hard copy. This overlaps with one of my reasons above.
So in conclusion, a similar outcome can be achieved by:
So long as books cost more than the paper they are printed on, is there ever a need to "Buy" a book.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I've gained quite a bit of respect for this author. I mentioned his book on twitter, and he promptly responded to my comment, and I've since then been following him. I generally only follow locals or people I have a significant reason to follow. I like his ethics and intitative. Free distribution of knowledge for those who seek it is a rather noble thing.
The author states he tried to get the publisher to allow free reproduction of electronic copies. This indicates that he signed over his rights of electronic reproduction (e-rights) to them, and is aware he did so. He may retain ownership over the text, but he has signed over the right to reproduce it in this form.
This has been standard practice in publishing for some time. Unless one is big enough to dictate one's own contracts, one ends up signing a contract with things in it favorable to the publisher in ways that aren't clear at first. The problem here came to light for me in the early days of the SFWA exploring piracy, e-rights and such. While some said that publishers were simply getting the authors to sign over rights just in case the publisher could figure out how to make money at it, some claimed a more sinister intent. They said that the publisher's were asking for exclusive (temporary or not) e-rights, so that if they encountered cases of the text being pirated in this form, it fell to the author to prevent other release in this form and so guarantee the exclusivity offered to the publisher in the contract. In this way the publisher avoided having to pursue, requiring the author to do so. If the author did not, it was tacit permission given to the pirate to reproduce a form covered in the contract.
Avoiding having to pursue was not the worst accusation. It was also claimed that the way the contracts were written, if the author did not act to protect his work against infringenment and so protect the rights he signed over to the publisher, the publisher could void the contract and require return of advance, royalties, etc., and if not forthcoming could appropriate the rights to the work.
Now, could have and would have aside, I know of no cases where it occurred. But the possibility was enough to be at least part of the reason Harlan Ellison chose to pursue some pirates, AOL, and RemarQ. (No, he didn't need to, he was making a point on behalf of others who couldn't afford this). And even if this has never occurred previously, if the present author's contract is written to give e-rights to the publisher and he not only doesn't pursue but allows or encourages electronic piracy, he'll be liable and could end up losing far more than potential sales.
e-rights are of little value in most cases except as leverage such as this. If nobody said or did anything publicly, probably nobody would have cared. But to publicly encourage others to violate rights he signed over could bring it all back down on him as well as cause other publishers who've lightened up on the whole subject to clamp back down.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Same here.
CmdrTaco, are you drunk?
http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/
Redirects to:
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/don/don_0.asp
I can think of two possibilities:
1) Article is bogus
2) Article site got hacked
http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ redirects, via seal.verisign.org, to the American Cancer Society. DMCA takedown *plus* domain-jacking?
Programmers who work so much with computers still love hard copies of programming books. Honestly I don't think that will ever change at all. Even with all these fancy e-ink e-book readers programmers still love hard copies and they love their large books. Maybe its just precisely because they work so much with computers that there is something refreshing about reading from a hard copy.
And yes the OP is right, giving away digital copies is in no way going to diminish the physical book sales. Programmers love e-books for reference like when you have already read the book and need to quickly find one chapter but most programmers can't stand reading an entire programming book on a monitor.
because anyone who has ever made any important contribution to the arts and sciences was paid in advance, and that's way it has to be
zzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why does the link take you to a cancer site to donate money? /. hijacked? Or the other site?
The Thing is.