
Why my book can be downloaded for free - draegtun
http://blog.plover.com/2014/12/01/
======
noelwelsh
It is surprising to see a blog post like this published in 2014. Admittedly is
refers to a 9 year old book, but the point it makes has been rendered moot by
developments since.

A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a
book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make
about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical
author can expect to make about $10'000 if their book sells well. The
publishing house makes about $200'000 on this, with the rest going to
distribution and book stores.

Now compare to people like Brennan Dunn who have made $100'000 or more from
their books, by publishing online and capturing 90%+ of revenue. You don't
need a publisher for distribution. You don't need a publisher for typesetting.
If you need an editor or proof reader you can hire one for maybe $10K.

In short, publishing houses serve no necessary function in modern technical
publishing.

~~~
jeremysmyth
_In short, publishing houses serve no necessary function in modern technical
publishing._

...aside from the economies of scale that they can apply to activities like
editing, typesetting, graphical presentation, technical review, release
scheduling, marketing, publicity, and cross-format distribution. There's also
the risk mitigation that happens when you get an advance that you can't deal
with yourself.

There's a _world_ of difference between "publishing on the Internet" and
"publishing in the age of the Internet".

~~~
sjcsjc
Not vouching for him, but Aaron Shepard, a children's author, maintains you
can self-publish efficiently and profitably these days.

"In fact, by aiming at Amazon, I was able to sell close to 30% the number of
copies sold by one of those nationally-distributed competitors including its
bookstore sales. And because the profit from my publishing system is so high
-- generally half or more of the cover price -- I was earning about twice as
much in total as that author would make with a normal royalty."[0]

He has a site on the subject[1], which looks like it was designed by me (it
wasn't - I don't know him).

[0] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiming-Amazon-Publishing-
Marketing-A...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aiming-Amazon-Publishing-Marketing-
Amazon-com/dp/093849743X/ref=pd_cp_b_0)

[1] [http://www.newselfpublishing.com/](http://www.newselfpublishing.com/)

~~~
louhike
The problem is that he is biased. He is selling books explaining how to self
publish on Amazon. So it is better for him to say that you will earn more
money doing so.

~~~
sjcsjc
Fair point. One more thing while I remember. He recommends a firm called
Lightning Source[0]. I got the impression (when I read his book a few months
ago) that they weren't too keen on dealing with small scale stuff, but just
looking there now it seems they have another brand or a partner called Ingram
Spark for dealing with independents. Might be useful for someone here, maybe.

[0] [http://www.lightningsource.com](http://www.lightningsource.com)

------
SwellJoe
"Unusually good book" may be too humble to be correct. It is a truly excellent
book.

Many higher order concepts eluded me for years (SICP was a good introduction,
but this goes much further, as an intermediate level book), but this was very
enlightening. I recommend it for anyone working in just about any language. I
was able to apply the concepts in Perl and JavaScript quite readily. And,
there are translation s of the examples to other languages on the web these
days.

~~~
vram22
>there are translation s of the examples to other languages on the web these
days.

Do you mean to other programming languages? (I already did see that there are
translations of the book to other human languages).

~~~
SwellJoe
Yes, the examples (which are in Perl in the book) are available in other
programming languages.

------
pasbesoin
I've been out of touch for many years, now, but the Perl community was one of
the most generous I encountered. And they were relatively early to this,
setting many an example that has been carried forward by other communities.
(There were earlier communities, of course, but the Perl community seemed to
be ascendent around the time that "programming" became "mainstream".

\+ CPAN

\+ YAPC -- a progenitor of the "just cover expenses", do it yourself un-
conference

\+ Frequent, and sometimes surprising, contact with the luminaries. I remember
the ongoing bait and switch BS at a few Microsoft events I attended.

I don't know... I was always on the margins, not in the midst. But Perl, as a
community, was always willing to show you how, and to lend a hand and a few
resources as appropriate/helpful. Very generous.

~~~
mjd
It's always been a good community. I think a lot of that comes from Larry.

~~~
alxndr
LIGASWAG?

------
KedarMhaswade
This is a very good thought! It's important for an author to break the barrier
to entry for the potential readers of his/her work. It's not always easy or
practical. Another way of doing this is publishing something in book form what
you have already published elsewhere, e.g. your blog. After all, what a reader
of free books, user of free and open source software is spending is the often
neglected non-renewable source of energy -- her/his time!

Sometimes however, authors consider their book(s) as their 'life's work'. It's
hard to imagine giving it away for free. Psychologically speaking, though best
things in life are often free, some people think that something that is
'expensive' is 'good' \-- they somewhat erroneously believe that 'cheapness
and quality don't go together'.

A related point that I have always wondered about is deciding the price of
your creation. For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing to
name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an author to
come up with the price of her book. By making it free on the website and
leaving it up to the publisher to do the hard work seems like a reasonable way
to get around this problem.

~~~
munificent
> Sometimes however, authors consider their book(s) as their 'life's work'.
> It's hard to imagine giving it away for free.

I don't think of my book as necessarily my _life 's_ work, but it's certainly
one of the most significant things I've done. People can read it online
without paying cash, but I don't think of that as being "free".

I _do_ get compensated, even then. Every time someone tells me they liked my
book, or enjoy my writing style, or finally understand something they've
struggled with, it feels absolutely fantastic. Given how much money we spent
purchasing good feelings, in many ways I feel like I just cut out the middle
man. :)

> A related point that I have always wondered about is deciding the price of
> your creation. For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing
> to name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an
> author to come up with the price of her book.

I just did the obvious thing: looked at a bunch of similar products and priced
it in the same ballpark.

------
marijn
This has worked very well for Eloquent JavaScript as well -- I suspect it'd
have remained obscure if it hadn't been available online (as a proper, web-
friendly HTML page). As it is now, it's being read by a _lot_ of people
online, and though I suspect less people read it on paper than online, it is
also being recommended and bought enough to financially compensate the time
that went into it.

~~~
jholman
Thank you so much for Eloquent JavaScript, Marijn! It's a really great book,
and it has given me a lot of value.

------
jeremysmyth
Cory Doctorow has a strong argument in the same direction, but with slightly
different expression:
[http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/#freedownload](http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/#freedownload)

~~~
ceronman
One more story that appeared here in HN a few days ago: Bob Nystrom writes
about the process of self publishing a book which is also available for free.
[http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/20/how-my-book-
lau...](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/20/how-my-book-launch-went/)

------
peteretep
It's an excellent book, too, even if you don't know Perl.

------
Alex3917
I have yet to go wrong taking advice from Philip Greenspun. The whole idea
that YC has been espousing recently about domain-specific knowledge often
being more valuable than pure technical ability, which was brought up in the
context of the female founder interviews, is something that Philip has been
talking about for 10+ years.

------
ilamont
_Part of this is that it 's an unusually good book. But I think the longevity
is partly because it is available as a free download. Imagine that person A
asks a question on an Internet forum, and person B says that HOP has a section
that could help with the question. If B wants to follow up, they now must find
a copy of HOP. If the book is out of print, this can be difficult. It may not
be in the library; it almost certainly isn't in the bookstore. Used copies may
be available, but you have to order them and have them shipped, and if you
don't like it once it arrives, you are stuck with it. _

Small publisher here. I believe other factors have contributed to its
longevity. I just did a quick lookup of the book on Amazon
([http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Order-Perl-Transforming-
Program...](http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Order-Perl-Transforming-
Programs/dp/1558607013)) and it has a couple of things going for it that help
contribute to long-tail sales:

* Availability of new copies of the book, which signals the content is probably still relevant/not obsolete and may also indicate it’s a classic/foundation title considering how long it’s been in print.

* A relatively high number of professional reviews and reviews from experts in the field

* A moderate number of great reader reviews, including many “Verified Purchases” from the past year

The current sales rank (579,897) indicates it's probably selling 1-3 copies
per month on Amazon U.S. The fact that there are so many used copies
available, not to mention the free PDF, no doubt reduces sales of the new
book, but there are still enough people out there who want a new copy of the
print edition for their bookshelves to keep the trickle of new sales.

Regarding the convenience issue: These days, it’s possible to buy a new book
online and return it or resell it later (as 63 other owners are doing right
now on the Amazon U.S. site). It’s a pain to list it and handle the packing,
but so is driving to a bookstore to bring back a return.

A note about free book downloads: Free titles are indeed very convenient for
those who are unable/unwilling to purchase the print edition, but they are
less likely to be read. I currently have a title available for on Amazon and
it’s been downloaded thousands of times, but through various mechanisms
(including reviews, follow-on sales of the 2nd volume, clicks to the website
from the ebook edition, etc.) I have determined it’s seldom read -- I'm
guessing less than 5% of the people who have downloaded the Kindle edition
have actually read any part of it. I think many free ebooks and PDFs end up on
people’s devices and don’t end up being read because of a lack of time and all
of the other free content that’s available out there.

~~~
mjd
Attributing the book's longevity to "availablity of new copies" is
tautologous.

~~~
jmount
No, it isn't. Some books that would continue to sell have great trouble due to
the publisher not supplying copies for a period. Lovasz's "Combinatorial
Problems and Exercises" was one such book which North Holland essentially
"held out of print" by refusing to make more copies available at a reasonable
price (and I hear refusing to admit it was out of print). This went on for
years until a new edition came out under AMS Chelsea.

------
ksearsbooks
To add some data around the self-publishing space overall, the best source by
far is Authorearnings.com which is run by Hugh Howey (who is most famous for
having become a success by giving away his book "Wool"). According to his
data, the small press, indie authors and alternative press options are
dominating the Amazon top 100 lists compared to prior years where traditional
publishers owned 90% of the market (genre fiction doing the best overall).

On the other hand, to self-publish non-technical books, assuming you use
quality service providers, you are probably looking at about $10K before
factoring in marketing (according to people like Guy Kawasaki). Juxtapose that
against the fact that 400k self-pubbed ISBN's were issued last year, and the
true indie success story seems like the proverbial unicorn.

* Although clearly in deep technical knowledge, there will be less competition for the quality material (short supply and all that).

Of course to further muddy the issue, what market share will go to the
subscription services as they become more popular? According to
Authorearnings, early data shows they are grabbing a lot of eyeballs from
those top-tier super-users.

------
kakakiki
Your book may be the reason I decide to take Perl seriously :) Thank you for
the share.

------
jmnicolas
Maybe his book is still relevant today because Perl didn't evolve much during
these past years ? (no troll, I just read a few articles about Perl, I have no
"insider" knowledge about the language situation except they're all waiting
for Perl 6).

Imagine a book about web development from 10 years ago, I guess nothing would
be usable without a lot of modifications and side researches.

~~~
mcguire
_HOP_ is a brilliantly-written exposition of a set of techniques that are
actually pretty ancient, but only commonly known in parts of the functional
programming and specifically Lisp community. It's real connection with Perl is
slim. The techniques are easily applicable to Ruby, Python, modern Perl, and
Javascript.

Web development? Well, HTTP and the underlying technologies are roughly the
same as they were 10 years ago; HTML, too. Relational databases haven't
changed much. The underpinnings are probably going to be as recognizable 10
years from now. But web development as a whole is incredibly fashion driven.
What will be popular in the future? I'm not even going to try to guess.

------
lsiebert
One of the main problems for books, and particularly technical books, is
breaking out and getting word of mouth, not avoiding piracy. There are a lot
of technical books out there, and a limited amount of time to find the good
ones.

Free content is a great advertisement.

------
chetanahuja
_" But I think the longevity is partly because it is available as a free
download. "_

I'm not sure that's the correct conclusion to be drawn. I suspect the
longevity of the book is more due to the fact that it's a perl (or rather,
perl5) book. And perl5, as we all know, is now officially an eternal language,
never to be supplanted with a newer version. perl6, that mythical beast, is
now officially a separate language not really meant to supplant perl5.

more details for the curious here :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl) )

------
sly010
Of course the case would be very different if you wanted to publish your book
as audio, which is probably much more expensive to produce.

~~~
sampo
> if you wanted to publish your book as audio

 _Higher-Order Perl_ as an audiobook would be quite an experience!

~~~
mcguire
Can you imagine the syntax highlighting? It's a brilliant idea!

------
pronoiac
Is the PDF title mangled in anyone else's ebook reader?

