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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
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
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
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.
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.
...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 word we're looking for here is "estoppel". He has now publicly stated that he won't sue. If he tries to renege and sue he could be estopped from doing so.
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.
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
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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.
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.
the author of the article redirect all requests to his page to go to the cancer site.
Maybe he's saying every time you pirate his book, God kills a cancer cell. Hopefully, the slashdot effect will cure cancer.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
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 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.