
Get Your Book, Make It Free - arunc
http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/get-your-book-make-it-free/
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AdmiralAsshat
Suggestion: Release your book as an EPUB rather than a PDF. PDF has the
reputation of being view-able "everywhere", but it's not exactly _pleasant_ to
read on anything other than a computer screen or a large tablet.

EPUB's, however, can dynamically reflow the text and resize the font to be
readable on your phone, your Kindle, your PC, etc. And they're far easier to
cleanly convert to other formats (even PDF, if that's your only option) than
the reverse direction.

~~~
teekert
This. I recently subscribed specifically to some Google website, including all
my work related info, to get an ebook on the state of Kubernetes. I was
looking forward to it... And then they send me a PDF which is completely
unreadable on my Kindle and I'm not going to read a whole book on my laptop. I
really hate it when people call PDFs ebooks. Sorry :)

~~~
ghaff
It really depends. Kindles are great if you're flowing a bunch of text. They
can work fine with more graphics (although you're mostly back to using a
tablet again) but the e-version really needs to be properly designed for it--
e.g. avoiding sidebars and that sort of thing. Just a low-effort conversion
can look pretty awful.

~~~
icxa
I have to disagree that they work fine with graphics, especially in low light
conditions. It's downright terrible in my opinion. I have a kindle version of
Calculus: Better Explained, and it's unreadable on my Paperwhite. I have to
resort to the kindle app on a tablet or PC.

~~~
ghaff
I actually agree with you. I was being sloppy. Kindle _format_ can work fine
with photos/graphics on a tablet and even a smartphone. (I've actually come
around to mostly liking eguidebooks because they're right on my phone and I
don't need to xerox the relevant pages to carry around.) But, much as I like
my Paperwhite, it's really just for reading text.

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throwayEngineer
I changed my book from 10$ to free.

After 300 sales I decided it was better to let hundreds of thousands learn how
to save money, than 300.

My only regret is there is no positive feedback.

With a sale, I get an email and paid. With a book view, I barely get
analytics.

I suppose my request as an author, give feedback. At least let me know what
you like or didn't like.

~~~
martin_a
Have you thought about asking for a symbolic price like $1?

~~~
falcor84
In my experience, even just $1 would have a significant chilling effect. And
making the book available for free has the benefit of helping those who don't
have credit cards (due to e.g. geography, socioeconomics or age).

A nice alternative can be a "pay what you want"approach, with a recommended
amount and an option to pay nothing.

~~~
antepodius
I would imagine the credit card usage forms the majority of the chilling
effect. Personally, I find it a lot more annoying to faff around with using
the credit card to pay for something (even when I consider the cost
negligible) than to just download it.

~~~
martin_a
On a second thought, this is what happens to me, too.

Before I pay a $1 and have to log in to PayPal or whatever, I will rather not
pay anything, although I value the content.

Interesting effect.

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Veen
I'd urge writers to release in as many formats as possible. Personally, I
prefer reading PDFs on my iPad because the typography is often superior to
ePub readers.

~~~
Angostura
Hmmm? pop a ePub into iBooks on your iPad and you change font, size etc to
your hearts content and it will reflow nicely. Not so with a PDF

~~~
Veen
I'm reading the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language at the moment. It
has a complex layout with varied typography, examples with subscripts and
superscripts, text that's left, center, and right aligned, callout boxes,
sidebars, diagrams, tables, multiple heading levels, footnotes and so on. ePub
simply can't handle complex layouts or typographic requirements beyond those
you'd find in a novel. Also, the justification and hyphenation algorithms in
ePub readers are typically complete crap.

~~~
mrob
>the justification and hyphenation algorithms in ePub readers are typically
complete crap.

IMO, ePub readers have the best justification algorithm: flush left, and the
best hyphenation algorithm: never hyphenate. PDFs often force full
justification on you, which makes it harder to read because all the line
endings have the same spacing, making it easy to lose your position in the
text.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
I actually doubt that "flush left only" and "no hyphenation" are the only, or
even standard, options for most readers.

But I think there's a synthesis possible between what you mean and what OP
meant: ePub readers are somewhat better at adjusting to the reader. "Reader"
here in terms of both the device and the actual human. Text can reflow,
columns are used only where they make sense, and settings can be changed.

PDFs are better at allowing the creator to, well, create. I know there's a
hard core demographic that doesn't believe in any sort visual design. Yet
there are topics and authors where choices of placement, font, color etc. are
made with intent, and to good effect. Everything Tufte comes to mind.

It should be possible, with something like Apple's Book Author, to create such
designs that work well within the e-Book format. But I haven't seen any
examples, probably because I rarely read textbooks these days and tend to buy
paper copies of such books, anyway.

In as far as I have seen illustrations in non-PDF formats, the results are
dismal, with all sorts of sizing problems etc.

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FarhadG
\- (React) Have sold thousands and now offered for free:
[https://leanpub.com/ui-react](https://leanpub.com/ui-react)

\- (Real-Time Rendering with WebGL2) Just reached out to the publisher. Let's
see what happens: [https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-
interactive-...](https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-
applications-
ebook/dp/B07GVNQLH5/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541780051&sr=8-1&keywords=webgl+2#customerReviews)

------
xrd
O'Reilly let me put my book up. Thanks O'Reilly for being a cool publisher!

[https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/](https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/)

------
chadash
Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work? I'll
go a step further and say that I think that authors offering up their work for
free hurts the entire ecosystem, since it gives consumers the expectation that
information is free.

Look at phone apps as an example. We've gotten to a point that many (maybe
most) people won't pay $5 for a high quality game that they get hours of usage
out of. So the savviest (in terms of making money) developers make games with
a freemium model, giving you a basic game for free, but charging you for
extras and add-ons. On the face of it, this is fine, since Jack can decide to
make a freemium game and Jill can make her game paid. The problem is that Jill
now lives in a world where free games are so much the norm that without
incredible marketing power, people won't even take a look at her.

The same thing has taken hold in much of the software we use. It's hard to get
my boss to agree to pay $300 for a non-open source, but really nifty JS
library, because there's an inferior version available for free. Another
example is Matlab, which is paid software but is slowly losing marketshare to
Python for scientific computing (numpy/scipy). I personally prefer the latter,
but when I tried out the former in grad school, I was impressed with how well
Matlab was documented and that I could reach out to them and get quick answers
if things weren't working as I expected them to (hint: in python/scipy, things
were often a little bit off in the code. With matlab, it was usually something
_I_ was doing. But it's very helpful to have a paid expert get back to me and
tell me that). It's a shame that people have gotten so used to free software
that they often won't consider paid software anymore.

I get that for things that involve security, you might want to be able to
audit things. And I also think that we 100% need some things to be open
standards decided on by the community. I'm not _against_ free software, I'm
against people not being able to make a living writing paid software. Or
someone spending a lot of time writing a great piece of paid software only for
someone to come along and immediately copy them with a free version.

I don't think that the same thing has taken hold yet with books. By and large,
people are still willing to pay for these. But I sure hope it stays that way.

EDIT: I agree with many that the length of copyrights is ridiculous. I like
the idea of copyright generally, but I think that we need to strike a balance
where producing information is rewarded but has its limits. I don't know what
the answer should be, but life of author plus 70 years (current rule in the
US) seems a bit excessive.

EDIT 2: To show where we area potentially headed, look no further than
newspapers. How many newspapers that exist today are going to be viable over
the next 20 years? Even local newspapers in major cities are struggling
because people today have the expectation that news should be free. I think
that there are interesting proposals for government funding that would allow
citizens to allocate a share of funds to media outlets of their choice. I
haven't really given these much thought. But absent something like that, the
future is going to be filled with a small number of big players plus a lot of
tabloids, eyeball grabbing headlines, and outright fake news.

~~~
clarry
> Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work?

No. The question is what's the right way to get there?

> I'll go a step further and say that I think that authors offering up their
> work for free hurts the entire ecosystem, since it gives consumers the
> expectation that information is free.

Once produced, information should be free. Doing research, writing it down,
making a book, none of that needs to be free.

~~~
Veen
> Doing research, writing it down, making a book, none of that needs to be
> free.

That works in some cases. I get paid for ghost writing articles and books for
business people. They usually publish for free to make themselves look clever.
But no one would claim that the result is independent or motivated by artistic
creativity.

Your model is fine for hackwork and what is essentially marketing, but that's
about all it's fine for. No one would have paid $INSERT_FAVORITE_NOVELIST to
research and write their novels if they knew there'd be zero chance of making
a return on that investment.

~~~
clarry
> No one would have paid $INSERT_FAVORITE_NOVELIST to research and write their
> novels if they knew there'd be zero chance of making a return on that
> investment.

Uh, do you buy novels for RoI? I thought you'd buy them to read and enjoy
them. And you'd give novelists money so that they can write a book for you to
read and enjoy.

~~~
chadash
He's not talking about ROI for the consumer, he's talking about ROI for the
author who put time into writing a novel. Take Dickens, who was famously
opposed to the _lack_ of copyright laws in America at the time and felt that
he was getting cheated by people who read his work without paying him. I
wonder how many people sent him money out of good will?

Yes, there is Patreon for supporting creators, but very few people make a
decent living this way. And many authors would prefer a publisher who helps
them take a risk by fronting money to something like Patreon, where you are at
the mercy of your consumers who may or may not give you enough money to create
your work.

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kvartz
I agree with author's point in regard of fiction/non fiction literature, as it
gets traction among readers there is a better chance to sell a hard copy or
get a citation.

However in case of professional and academic literature, as much as I would
prefer that personally, such approach simply is not maintainable.

The best middle ground I've come across is when author gives out free copies
per each request (like a letter from student who can't afford to pay the full
amount)

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otakucode
Oh, the post points out that Physically Based Rendering is free now (a 2016
book). I'm not even mad. It was worth the steep price it originally cost. If
you're interested in rendering based on physics, it's excellent. If you're
interested in "literate coding" where the manuscript and the source code are
the same thing, it is stellar as that is the way it was built. I highly
recommend it.

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LeonB
This is a good step in making your work live a longer life, and do more to
help the world.

Particularly once that first (and likely only) flush of money has come and
gone.

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harshreality
I support this in principle, but doesn't Amazon require that you not sell the
book anywhere for less than the Amazon price? I'm pretty sure that means you
can't give it away for free, either. I think that's why, although some books
that are sold for money on Amazon are creative commons licensed, you won't
generally find them on the authors' websites. It's legal, but I think it's a
violation of the author or publisher's contract with Amazon to do that.

3rd parties can make such books available, though... legally, at least. In
that situation, Amazon's TOS (assuming it has something like "thou shalt not
redistribute any books purchased from Amazon without Amazon's permission") for
ebook buyers would violate the clearly stated book license, so the TOS would
become void, right?

~~~
notatoad
The rules for self-published books on amazon and the rules for publishers are
very different. if you have a book published through KDP you almost certainly
can't offer it for free, but if you're published through through one of the
big 5 then you can do whatever your deal with the publisher says.

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lifeisstillgood
On a side topic, how does one arrange the rights for a self published book (ie
If I write a book but publish myself is putting "(c) Paul" good enough?)

Edit: mostly I don't need to or it's obvious
[https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-
do-i-...](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-do-i-put-on-
my-copyright-page-when-self-publishing)

This article it seems is mostly where you assigned away your rights to a
company if it falls out of publication.

~~~
asplake
Read your contract before signing. For my two most recent books I retain the
right to buy the publisher out (not a traditional publisher but one serving
the self-pub market).

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60654
What a great reminder to authors that it's possible. Especially in tech, since
the various technologies get replaced so quickly - quite a few books barely
sell out the first printing before they're already obsolete. Why not put them
up online for free after that.

Plus, the freebie can serve double duty as free marketing for the next
edition.

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ChuckMcM
I wish more authors would do this. I too prefer EPUB but I recognize there is
lower friction to just publish it as a PDF.

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skookumchuck
Very, very few authors make enough off of their books to live on. They write a
book, make a few hundred or a few thousand off of it, the book goes out of
print, they're forgotten.

At least re-release it for free after the first two or three years. Then, it
serves as an advertisement for your skills or the next book you write.

~~~
ghaff
>Then, it serves as an advertisement for your skills or the next book you
write.

That assumes the book still serves as a good advertisement. Whether it's just
because your writing skills have improved or because, for non-fiction, things
have changed and your book is very out of date, you may not really want people
to judge you by it.

I eventually pulled a book I wrote about 6 years ago because so much had
fundamentally changed in the technologies and market dynamics I had written
about at the time. (You can actually still get it for free from my website in
PDF but it's not really something that would be useful for anyone outside of
providing a dated historical snapshot.)

~~~
pfranz
While it can confuse things to have out of date documentation out there. I
often get stuck with setups using out of date software. Maybe it's 1% of 1% of
users, but finding good references for out of date stuff is so nice.

~~~
sitkack
I totally agree. When maintaining ancient software, I usually have to end up
hunting for the source of the dependencies just to regenerate the
documentation. Time is not linear.

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fjsolwmv
Why do publishers agree to rights reversion? It reduces heir opportunity to
directly profit and it increases competition for their other books they sell.

~~~
Matticus_Rex
Most books (especially more than a year in) aren't actually a profit
opportunity, and the effect of increasing competition for their other books is
small enough to be totally negligible (at least in the current state of the
market). And, as the other comment said, free ebooks can drive book sales.

