
Avoid Apress - jemeshsu
http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/avoid-apress.html
======
Lazare
For me, Apress's apparent feeling that the wording of contracts just doesn't
matter, and the comment that they "don't modify the standard contract" are
huge _huge_ red flags, and I've had major issues in the past with this.

Their seems to be a scarily common school of thought that contracts are,
basically, magic incantations to ward off the lawyer demons. You just need to
have _a_ contract, sign it, and somehow, magically, everything will be okay.

This is, obviously, not how it works. The wording of a contract is of absolute
import; you should never ever sign one without reading it closely, and
(ideally) getting a lawyer familiar with the issues to read it over. But I've
had more than one boss or client who had a "standard" wildly inappropriate
contract they expected me to sign, and when I pointed out some issues would
just say "oh, those clauses don't matter"/"don't apply to you"/"just ignore
them".

In my experience, confidentiality agreements are especially likely targets for
this egregious mentality. "Uh, this contract says that if I throw together a
mockup of an iPhone app for you, you will own all the IP/product
ideas/designs/technology I develop for the next three years." "Oh, don't worry
about that, it's just a standard clause - just sign right here." "...No."

Madness. And yes, most people are playing it honest, and have no intention to
try and enforce whatever crazy clause is in the "standard" contract, or
invalidate it, or other legal shenanigan. But you just never know...

~~~
wisty
IANAL, but if you want a "standard" contract, then you just put the deal on
paper. Common law and legislation automatically has a framework for "standard"
contracts - that's the legal framework that governs your plumber when they fix
your leaking tap.

If the negotiator doesn't know what terms can be changed (as they are just
there to define the deal), and which can't (as they are there to limit legal
risk, and can't be changed in any way without upsetting the lawyers), it's a
bad sign.

Some terms will tend to describe the work (you do X, we pay you Y). The
lawyers don't need to touch that, as long as everything is clearly defined
(though they will want to check the definitions). It's up to non-lawyers to
decide what the deal is.

Other terms are less flexible, and describe what the legal situation will be
if the shit hits the fan. Stuff like jurisdiction, arbitration, liability,
when the contract becomes void, and resolution process. You won't like it (as
it's there to cover the other party's ass), but you probably won't get it
changed - that's the way their lawyers like to play ball, and the agent you
are dealing with won't be able to convince the legal team to change anything
without a lot of work.

------
jeremymcanally
I'm convinced that most publishers are difficult to work with and actually
care very little for their authors. It seems that O'Reilly really has some
great people inside, and I really think the Pragmatic Bookshelf is a fantastic
staff and author program. But for my part with the few publishers I've worked
with, it's been nothing but hassle.

The issues with payment were annoying, but even worse in my case were
publisher content control struggles. The book concept I was to work on was
explained to me numerous times as "not a recipe book but an example driven
narrative book." I think we discussed that at least 5 times leading up to the
kick off. After I submitted the first 3 chapters, they suddenly shifted gears
and gave me example outlines for the chapters that remained to follow.

They were freaking recipe chapters (problem/solution/discussion ad nauseum).

There was no discussion of this change, and any attempted further shift in
content was met with "well we told you we hadn't worked out this series fully
yet." They'd basically jacked the book out from under me and changed it to a
book I didn't want to write. I think I wrote one or two more chapters and
farmed the rest out to contributors. Terrible experience.

To make matters worse, I made very little money off of it because they didn't
promote it at all. They never sent copies to conferences or user groups unless
I asked them to. They never sought out blogs and other things like that to
help promote it whatsoever. Part of the problem was they really sucked at
promoting their books (other authors have had the same issues), but another
part was that they had about 4 different marketing managers during the
timeline for my book, which made coordinating efforts incredibly difficult.

So, yes, I think this gent's experience isn't totally out of the norm, even
though I wish that wasn't the case.

~~~
zedshaw
Curious, what was the title and subject matter for the book?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I'm going to guess it was <http://www.manning.com/mcanally/>

~~~
zedshaw
Ah, I was thinking this was another book that he didn't finish. Thanks.

~~~
jeremymcanally
Yup I didn't particularly want to call them out directly, but that's it. There
was another book I worked on with O'Reilly that was actually a really good
experience, but I just didn't have time to finish it unfortunately. :(

------
jackowayed
It seems like starting work before a contract is in place (save maybe very
high-level exploratory work, like a table of contents) is a recipe for
disaster. They don't _really_ owe you anything until there's a signed contract
in place saying you do.

Now, it's possible that Apress is problematic in that they strongly encourage
people to work despite there being no contract in place ("we'll figure it
out", "you have our word", "legal is slow", etc), which then puts them in a
better negotiating position when it is contract time because people have
already done much of the work.

But I wonder what would have happened if he had said, "I'll do high-level
planning, but I won't write a single paragraph of actual content until we have
a firm, mutually-satisfying contract in place." Maybe it would have gotten him
a firm date on when he would get his advance that they would stick to, plus
deadlines in the contract that were actually in the future and other good
things. Or maybe they would have still said, "no, just write it, we'll figure
that out later", which would not look good

~~~
mixu
Apress is a freaking publisher - shouldn't they be expected to be at least
minimally professional? Whatever the initial agreement e.g. regarding advances
was, the fact remains that Apress did not pay the author until several months
after they had completed the work despite several months of inquiries,
reminders and so on.

Either Apress is just plain unprofessional (e.g. unwilling/extraordinarily
slow) or as you said they are doing this in order to put themselves in a
better negotiating position.

I had a similar experience with Apress while working with them as a technical
reviewer. They printed the book without asking me for my bio, so I didn't get
my five lines of text credits for the work I did. It wouldn't have cost them
anything to do that, but they nevertheless screwed it up.

Needless to say, I figured it's way too much of a hassle to deal with them
when they approached me to write an actual book, since I want to spend my time
writing rather than following up to make sure my publisher does what they are
supposed to do.

Yes, with a contract you have better legal recourse. But I'd prefer to work
with people I don't have to sue in order to get paid, esp. when the sums
involved are tiny.

~~~
asr
It certainly seems like apress doesn't have their act together, but the fact
remains it's a bit silly to refuse to sign a contract and then expect to be
paid an advance whose amount is apparently fixed in the contract! In this
case, the author could have saved a lot of trouble by asking for an acceptable
contract instead of just not signing anything.

Again, i'm happy to accept that apress is unprofessional and a pain, but when
someone sends you a contract that says 'completion by X' and that's not ok,
ask for a change! If apress paid advances to authors who refused to sign
contracts with them, they could get into a lot of trouble.

~~~
mikeash
Once I started asking about my advance, Apress was happy to have me sign, and
then sign themselves, a contract which specified payment in the past. They
then took over two months of constant hassle to actually cough up the money.
Note that I didn't actually start complaining until a date was fixed etc. and
they missed it, so I think your remarks about being silly are off-base.

------
mikeash
I'm seeing a few common themes in comments, so I figure I'll address them all
at once. I'm writing this comment both for my blog and Hacker News, so please
excuse vagueness etc.

Beginning work without a contract was certainly not a smart move. They talked
a good game but I still should have known better. However, I think I was still
in a pretty good position, because it is that contract that gave them the
right to use my work. I already had a reasonably popular technical blog that
would have made a fine home for what I wrote if they had changed their minds.

In fact, this gave me quite a bit of leverage when it came time to get the Pro
Objective-C contract amended. After they refused my amendments, I pointed out
that they could not use my work without a contract, and that I would not sign
anything that didn't have my amendments. They changed their tune with amusing
rapidity.

The amendments I requested were fairly simple. Aside from fixing the dates, I
struck out portions that required ongoing work from me, such as responding to
errata, since I was no longer involved with the book.

The money involved was not large, for sure. In general, writing technical
books doesn't pay well. There are good reasons to do it (exposure, fun,
satisfaction, etc.) but money isn't one. I went into the project knowing that
I wasn't doing it for the money. Given that, it might seem strange to have
such a problem over money, but I don't think it is: even though I wasn't doing
it for the money, I was still promised money, and I simply couldn't tolerate
any crap over it.

For everyone talking about other publishers, I appreciate the sentiment, but I
have moved into self-publishing. The Complete Friday Q&A is self-published and
the experience was great. I intend to continue doing so in the future. I
really don't see much of a role for traditional publishers these days.

~~~
jpdoctor
Thank you for the post. This stuck out at me:

> _but I have moved into self-publishing._

As near as I can tell, publishers have one and only one purpose in the modern
world: Publicity. They might as well change the name of the biz to reflect
this, because it is the only differentiator they have.

~~~
mikeash
They do provide other useful services, like copy-editing and tech review.
However, they don't provide these very _well_ , and the amount of money they
take in exchange is huge.

They also provide a bit of financing, sort of like how movie studios are
basically banks who specialize in investing in one particular area. But with
the typical tech book advance coming in under five figures, this isn't very
big.

~~~
mst
I'll note here that on the Apress book that I worked on, the copy editing and
tech review provided were both excellent, certainly far beyond what I would
have sourced myself (note "would", not "could" - in the case of tech review I
probably knew people who would have been equally good but I'm fairly sure that
I would have picked the wrong people).

~~~
mikeash
Only one chapter I wrote got that far, but my experience was that the tech
reviewing was at best neutral, whereas the copy editing was ok but not great.

My chapter walked through designing and implementing a custom binary protocol
running over UDP for realtime network communication over a LAN. One reviewer
suggested that I expand on a bit that went something like, "Create a new
project in Xcode" with a step-by-step along the lines of, "1. Open Xcode and
pull down the File menu...." This seemed to be well below the level I was
aiming for, but of course I could never get anyone at Apress to tell me who
they agreed with.

The copy editor was decent but not technically minded, so I had to explain a
fair amount. I imagine that technically-minded copy editors are hard to come
by, but still, this is a technical press.... The copy editing _process_ was
atrocious. I had to download some crazy Adobe software to review the suggested
changes, and for some reason they do the indexing _before_ these final
changes, so I had to ensure that any alterations didn't reflow pages too much.

When I self published, I ended up crowdsourcing people for these functions by
recruiting on my blog and on Twitter. I got a couple of dozen fairly competent
people and we were able to divide up the book so that nobody had to do more
than a couple of chapters. (Some ended up doing much more, but simply because
they wanted to.) That ended up working pretty well, although obviously not
every prospective author will have the ability to recruit a couple of dozen
helpers like that.

------
projectileboy
I'd like to hear what Peter Seibel's experience was with Practical Common
Lisp, or some other authors. From an outsider's perspective, I've always been
impressed that some Apress books continue to offer online versions for free,
which suggests that Apress allows their authors to retain IP rights to their
books. Can anyone comment?

~~~
lukev
Author of Practical Clojure here. Without getting into detail, the experiences
outlined in the article are not unique to him. If you're really interested in
the gory details feel free to email me at <my first name>@<my last name>.net

------
orbitingpluto
The experience is not limited to Apress.

I was at a garage sale. Tons of Wrox books were in a pile for two bits each.
When I went to pay I noticed that the spiky haired blond guy on the cover of
one of the books was the same spiky haired blond guy I was handing quarters
to.

Paying attention can earn you a very interesting story! Short version: In this
case the author did have a contract, but they kept upping the schedule as they
were selling the company (and didn't tell the author). He was paid, but it
took a very very long time and he said that was the last book he is ever going
to write.

I asked him if he was sure he wanted to sell it. (It was his last and only
copy.) "I guess I should keep it. I wrote the book after all."

------
lionhearted
A lot of industries that perform badly for no good reason rely on shaming and
saying "it's unprofessional to come out publicly" to keep people in line, or
they use legal threats and other leverage.

Good on Mike for coming out. If 5% of people shared their experience honestly,
damn near every bad industry would be reformed quickly.

------
harryf
I got mixed up these guys back in 2003, when the were still called Wrox press.
Reading this timeline makes me think this "bait and switch" is part their
standard operating practice when dealing with authors. Back in 2003 they were
also desperate for cash (
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/17/wrox_hit_the_rocks_a...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/17/wrox_hit_the_rocks_as/)
) and ended up publishing the book I worked on (with 3 others) minus the last
5 chapters which were still being written. I wont mention the title as frankly
I'm ashamed of it. Happy to verify via PM to the same username on reddit

~~~
hello_moto
These guys as in publishers or Apress?

I thought Apress is a totally different company altogether?

~~~
harryf
On paper yes. But Apress bought all Wrox successful titles and (I suspect)
it's people. Same game different name in other words

------
rwmj
My Apress experience: <http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/>

~~~
gtani
Always wondered about that, I spent a lot of time in Borders reading the
Apress Ocaml and F# books (and bought the F# books). The Ocaml book is ...
exceptional

~~~
rwmj
The whole experience (which went on for something like 2 years!) was screwed
up from beginning to end. My apologies to you or anyone who spent money on
that book. It was published against my advice. Apress promised there'd be a
heavy copy edit/rewrite before publication, but that never happened.

Jason Hickey's OCaml book (search for it - a PDF is floating around) is
excellent.

------
latchkey
I think maybe a better title would be 'Lesson learned: Don't start work until
a contract is signed.'

I fully understand that the potential for delaying or losing the contract
completely could be part of the motivation for starting work in advance or in
parallel to a contract. But, it seems that in this case, was the headache
worth it?

Regardless, I do agree that it sounds like Apress should have treated the
author with more respect. I'd love to hear the other side of this story as
well.

~~~
pbreit
But that might get shortened to "Don't start work". Contracts are notoriously
difficult to finalize. If you don't take the risk, someone else probably will.
Best is to establish trust with counterparty.

~~~
otoburb
In some professional service firms, this situation is called "starting working
at-risk". Depending on the deal size, this often requires obtaining approval
up the chain so that somebody can evaluate and ideally limit the risk
involved.

I completely agree with this sentiment; sometimes starting work at-risk is a
sign of good faith and goes a long way to establishing trust. Just make sure
that there is a follow-up plan along the lines of "I'm working at-risk for X
days. If the contract isn't signed by then, or if I've reached the first small
milestone/chapter/deliverable, I stop work."

Except, in this case, it seems the OP actually had a signed contract (half way
through his timeline) but Apress still refused to cough up the payment that
they obligated themselves to pay. That just sucks.

~~~
mikeash
You are correct. Contract signed in September, which Apress was instantly in
breach of since they didn't even bother to change it to suit the lateness, and
payment for that one didn't happen until late November.

------
mark_l_watson
I liked working with APress for my book that they published. They found a very
good technical editor for my book project who added a lot of value and the
editors were all nice to work with. The only negative thing was that the book
did not sell very well so I didn't make money for my business partner (i.e.,
APress).

The only publisher I ever had a negative experience with was Manning. My
project was cancelled and they told me to keep the advance. I wanted to return
the advance and own the book and they declined (I think because they had
similar titles in the pipeline). However, I continue to think that the owner
of Manning is a great guy (I very much enjoyed all of our conversations), and
I still buy _lots_ of Manning books (probably 10 in the last year).

The author of the linked article seems kind of bitter and it was unusual that
he didn't sign the contract for so long. Anyway, I wish him luck in his future
projects - it is great fun writing books.

------
taylorbuley
From a reader perspective, I would highly advise checking out No Starch Press
(<http://nostarch.com/>) and Rosenfeld Media (<http://rosenfeldmedia.com/>) if
you haven't heard of these smaller imprints yet.

~~~
marijn
I've published a book with NoStarch, and can endorse them from an author's
perspective as well.

~~~
taylorbuley
I read that book! Very elegant stuff :)

------
stevenp
I too was one of the contributing authors on iPhone Cool Projects and I also
had to run around chasing people to get paid my "advance" months after the
book had already been published.

I _did_ have a contract in place before starting, but Apress just ignored it,
and the only way I was able to track anyone down was to ask another more
popular author to help me find someone who could get me paid. My contacts at
Apress basically just ignored my emails and phone calls.

None of that even touches on the antiquated process where I got to spend hours
screwing around with a bunch of confusing MS Word templates because most of an
author's time is clearly best used trying to correct style errors. The entire
process had me wondering if this is really how these books get created. If it
is, I decided it definitely isn't for me, especially considering the minimal
pay.

Needless to say, I had a pretty awful experience with Apress too, which is a
shame, because I'm not a prolific blogger like Mike, and getting to have my
name on the front of a technical book was a really exciting achievement for
me. I'm proud of the work I did, but not really sure that I'd ever want to go
through this again.

------
Juha
I had my suspicions of Apress already after reading their Practical Django
Projects (2004) book. Book itself was quite ok, but it was referring to
downloadable source code of the presented projects from Apress website. To my
knowledge this sourcecode of the sample projects isn't still there. Gladly I
found some bitbucket projects with those sample projects written by other
readers, but my trust for Apress was lost.

------
maxer
i was asked to be a technical reviewer on a book with apress, i felt really
good about reviewing and agreed.

When i received the first few chapters i realized the book would have to be
re-written. The English was bad and the code was mediocre.

Since it wasn't a paid gig i felt insulted with the experience, the book would
require days if not weeks of work to complete rather than a few hours which i
had thought.

~~~
anghyflawn
Not to be snarky, but that's what reviewers do: help with good stuff, reject
bad stuff. Academia works the same way. Even if you think it's a racket, this
is far from unique to Apress.

~~~
mikeash
I don't think that's the case. The purpose of a _technical_ reviewer is to do
fact checking on the technical aspects of the writing. If the writing itself
is bad, it never should have gotten that far.

------
Uchikoma
If you write books for the money, you're doing something wrong. Writing code
for the same amount of time will make you much more money.

Writing tech books is for advancing your career, get consulting gigs, get
invited to conferences etc.

That said, sending contracts with deadlines that are in the past or before
work started looks not very professional.

------
hello_moto
This is the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to purchasing books from
Apress.

If my memory serves me right, both Peter Cooper (Beginning Ruby) and Mark
Pilgrim (Dive into Python) had "hiccups" as well dealing with Apress.

Average or below quality marred with treating the people like this is enough
red marks to stay away from them.

Note: I know there are a few books that HN-ers love published by Apress such
as the XYZ At Work series. That particular series, no pun intended and not to
disrespect to author, is totally different when you compare it to technical
books.

------
jefflinwood
I like most of the people I've come into contact with at Apress ever since
they acquired my first book from Wrox after a giant debacle.

That said, they've made some very strange strategic decisions about their book
line that basically involved my co-author and I taking future editions of our
books in directions that we completely disagreed with.

Tech book authoring really isn't a very good way to make money, so I wouldn't
really worry about a thousand dollar advance - after all, it's an advance
against royalties, so you should get paid either way.

------
Nelson69
Why aren't more technical books self published?

I've heard these same things echoed from non-technical book publishing
experiences too. The publishers are quite simply middlemen, they can front
some production costs to get books in to brick and mortar stores but expect
very little unless you have a proven track record and you give a lot up for
that. A friend wrote a book (a novel), found a publisher, and basically he was
going to pay for everything, literally, pay for the first round of published
books, pay to promote, effectively self-publishing the book but sharing the
profits. His best avenue for making money on it is to sell the books himself
on amazon. Never mind the crappy nature of so many technical books anymore.

Technical books, with technical audiences? Short of the tiny amount of money
upfront, I can't see at all why you wouldn't self-publish. The audience is
forward thinking, they get it.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Unfortunately the answer for your friend is simple: He got scammed. If a
"publisher" asks you to pay for everything, or indeed for anything but
postage, they are a scammer. There are entire message boards dedicated to
authors warning other authors away from such scams; look e.g. for Absolute
Write's "Bewares" section or google "Yog's Law" ("Money flows toward the
writer.")

Paying for your own publication costs is called _vanity press publishing_ ,
and it's okay provided you know what you're doing: You are almost certainly
taking a big loss in order to get your work into paper form. You will only
make money if you've got publishing talent, which equates to "marketing
talent": You've got to be good at selling books, which is very hard,
especially if you've never done it before.

(Before I got distracted by the story of your poor friend, I was going to
answer: many do self-publish, more and more every day, but you don't notice
them as often because they aren't as well promoted. Also, whereas it's fairly
easy to market tech books online non-tech books are far harder to sell without
market knowledge that publishers have scraped together over decades, non-
techie writers therefore lust after contracts, and techies imitate non-techie
writers. And, because getting a publishing contract probably increases the
odds that your book will get finished, because someone else is pushing you
toward completion, when we survey the universe of manuscripts we
disproportionally sample the ones that get turned into finished books by
publishers.)

(And, yes, e-readers are busily upending this centuries-old industry, so ask
again in five years for a completely different answer.)

------
adamjernst
Mike, did your refusal to sign the contract (despite your continuing work on
the project) have anything to do with the delay in payment?

Did you attempt to modify the deadline to a future date, and if so did they
refuse to accept that version of the contract?

~~~
mikeash
For the first payment, I signed a contract as soon as they asked me to, and
they still didn't pay me for months.

For the book, my refusal to sign almost certainly delayed payment. I modified
the deadlines, removed clauses about ongoing work (dealing with errata etc.)
that I wasn't going to do, etc., but nothing major. They refused to accept it,
but immediately changed their tune once I pointed out that they couldn't
actually publish what I wrote without a contract, and there was no way I was
signing without those changes.

------
alanh
Reminds me of the stand Sebastian Marshall is taking against Simon &
Schuester. He also points to overdue advances and sluggish response times.
[http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/an-open-letter-to-simon-
and...](http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/an-open-letter-to-simon-and-
schuester-ceo-carolyn-reidy)

------
reuven
I've written a book (a decade ago, for Prentice Hall), and I talked with
Apress about writing a second one. Apress, it should be noted, forgot about
our discussions, and I didn't push, so the project dropped.

The first thing to realize about writing a computer book is that you probably
won't make much money off of it. Indeed, you'll probably make very little
money from it. So it's not a surprise to hear that the author made so little.

It's also not surprising to hear that Apress didn't promote the book. I'm on
the receiving end (as a Linux Journal columnist) of book press releases, and I
easily get 1-2 such messages per week. The publishing business is in a
terrible state, and while it seems paradoxical that it costs too much to
market the book in a serious way, that is the case. When I wrote my book (and
granted, this was before Facebook Twitter, and the like), I was responsible
for ensuring that it was reviewed on Web sites and magazines; I didn't feel
like the publisher did very much.

Given that my book got very positive reviews, you would have thought that they
would have pushed to market it more, or to do a second printing. But they
didn't. Most books are basically thrown out there, and the few that make a lot
of money, by some combination of skill, contacts, and luck, get additional
printings.

Apress was founded by someone who was fed up with other publishers, and so
it's sad to hear that they have problems with contracts. But it's always
unwise to into into a business agreement without a contract of some sort; I've
learned this the hard way on a number of occasions through my 15-year
consulting career. Writing the book before the contract was set was a mistake
that the author made.

When I wrote my book, I also hired an agent. On the one hand, he got 10
percent of whatever I earned, which wasn't much to begin with. On the other
hand, he got rid of many clauses in the contract that I never would have
thought to notice or remove. It was probably a wash financially, but knowing
that someone was there, helping me out, was a good feeling.

If I had to write a book nowadays -- and I'm certainly thinking of doing so --
I'd probably go the self-published, Ebook route. Ebooks can be shorter, are
more flexible in terms of format, and will probably net a good author about
the same amount of moeny as they would get from a publisher, minus much of the
hassle. True, a good publisher will give you good technical edits, indexes,
and distribution, but with rare exception, I have to wonder how useful those
really are nowadays.

The bottom line is what while Apress might not have been professional about
how they treated this author, it seems pretty par for the course in today's
world. It's a shame, given how much work goes into writing a book, that he had
to have such problems. I'm guessing that if had signed a contract in advance
of the work, and perhaps even had an agent helping him, it would have worked
out better. But maybe Apress has lost touch with their author-centric roots
(that's the "A" in Apress, by the way), and smaller publishers such as the
Pragmatic Programmers are the place to go for aspiring authors.

------
vonskippy
Since we only "hear" one side of the story, it's impossible to tell if he's
brave, daring, or foolish doing work without a specific and valid contract. At
least it ends with him getting paid.

~~~
mikeash
Perhaps some combination of all three. I consider getting involved with Apress
in general to have been a big mistake, and there are certainly warning signs
(like the contract) that I should have paid more attention to.

------
user63447
Tldr.

Don't do business with mikeash because he will totally criticize you on the
main page of Hacker News.

~~~
zedshaw
Welcome to the free market. It requires open information for everyone, which
includes criticisms. As long as it's true or obviously a hilarious joke or
parody, he's totally allowed to say it. And, doing that benefits everyone else
because the market can adapt.

Then again you're trolling so this comment is more for everyone else than for
dipshits like you.

~~~
its_so_on
I like how you say "as long as it's true or obviously a hilarious joke or
parody".

It's like, it's not enough to be obviously a joke or parody, your standard
requires actual hilarity.

I can see you in the judge's chair: "I'm sorry, it's obviously a parody but I
just don't see it as all that funny." "But your honor! [explains joke]." "Oh.
Hahaha, okay, I missed that. Haha, that's pretty funny. All right, counsel,
case dismissed!"

~~~
mikeash
"At 43 millihedbergs, this work falls short of the legal minimum of 50
millihedbergs, and therefore is not protected."

------
marcf
You were working without a contract.

I would suggest that is the whole reason this experienced sucked, not because
of Apress.

~~~
huxley
Not quite, he actually might have been working with a contract depending on
what the communications were between Apress and Mike.

An oral contract with implied commitments on both sides can still be legally
binding. It is certainly possible to sue someone for breach of an oral
contract.

