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."

re:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Feel free to pirate my book...free of chaaarrrge."

Re:Call Me Suspicious But ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why doesn't he simply make his own HTML plain text version and host it.

Let me know when you figure out how to make HTML plain text.

Torrent?

[chord.wav]

Torrent to the indexed version please? Thanks

Re:Call Me Suspicious But ...

[Anonymous Coward]

View->Source

OK, done.

Re:Tim O'Reilly's comment...

[tcopeland]

> did he have anything to say about Peter Cooper's assertion
> that a freely available e-book would promote hard copy sales?

Yup, he said:

We don't do it for all books because while there are some cases where free online exposure can help sell print books, there are also many cases where it seems to sell fewer books. A lot depends on whether a book is already visible or not.

and

"Free" should be seen as a strategic tool for publishing. Sometimes it helps; sometimes it hurts.

Pretty cool that he weighed in on this one.

Re:Why is the link incorrect?

[iron-kurton]

Maybe he's saying every time you pirate his book, God kills a cancer cell. Hopefully, the slashdot effect will cure cancer.

Re:Call Me Suspicious But ...

[shutdown -p now]

Let me know when you figure out how to make HTML plain text.

Well, that's obvious! Any power user knows that it's as simple as:

1. Take a screenshot of a page rendered in the browser using Print Screen.

2. Paste it into MSPaint and print it out.

3. Scan and OCR it (don't forget to press the "Scan to OCR" button on your scanner, and not "Scan to File"!).

4. Copy/paste the generated text as needed.

5. Repeat 1-4 for all other pages.

~