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Use the Creative Commons License for Free Books

One important thing to consider if you are planning on writing a free book is the license for the work. Traditional software licenses have some clauses that are not relevant to books or electronic media. Lessig's Creative Commons makes sense because he wrote it with books in mind. So where a license like Apache or GPL talks about "binaries" and "source", Creative Commons talks about "works" being "published". Even though the books I write have DocBook source code which is compiled into binary output, the Creative Commons talks about "Work". Here's the definition of "Work", which I find amusing because it mentions "circus performers". I often wonder if one of the Creative Commons folks put "circus performer" in the definition of Work on a dare:

""Work" means the literary and/or artistic work offered under the terms of this License including without limitation any production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression including digital form, such as a book, pamphlet and other writing; ... blah blah blah ...; or a work performed by a variety or circus performer to the extent it is not otherwise considered a literary or artistic work.

I write books under:

Which is very simply explained on the Creative Commons web site as:

"This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."

Most of the books I write have some sort of commercial interest associated with them. For example, I want to make money as a consultant or as a trainer. Or, the sponsoring company wants to sell a product or training. Although I know the next part of this sentence will appear invisible to Free Software Foundation people, I've found it necessary to have a protective No Derivatives clause for technical document as I've already had instances where content I've written has magically appeared in someone else's (lucrative) training material.

If you've written a technical book, you are also very familiar with the idea that there is no control. Someone is going to take your content, muck around with it, provided it as a free download on any one of a hundred sites designed to pirate books. Any selection of a license is really just aimed at people who are going to follow the rules.

Clauses

Here are the clauses I choose, and why...

Attribution - Just makes sense. Not controversial with anyone, right?

No Derivatives - I'm a bit old-fashioned, I feel like a book is a complete work. And, I don't want people picking and choosing parts of the book to publish. I'm also not particularly keen about people jumping up and creating a derivative work that rides off of a work I've helped create.

Non-commercial - This has a few meanings in the context of a technical book. It means that no one but the originating author (or sponsor) can sell the book as a part of a commercial offering. Someone else could sell the book at a reasonable cost like printing plus materials plus labor costs, but most people don't want someone to take their book and start selling it in some expensive package deal at least some discussion about licensing.

The other part of Non-commercial is that someone can't purchase ten copies of your book and then use it as a basis for a training class. This is tough to enforce, and I'm not sure you could realistically enforce this.

If you are more into the GPL side of life, you could drop the No Deriv / Non-commercial, and go with a Share Alike clause.

Conclusion

If you are thinking about starting a free book, think about the different clauses that are appropriate to your situation and choose wisely. Some of the clauses I listed above are far too restrictive for most open source work, but, if you are starting to write a book, you'll want to think about these issues.

Royalties and Reality

This post should be something everyone who has ever received a royalty check should read. I'm not going to say I've ever received a royalty check that was anything less than truthful, but I do resonate with the idea that publishers don't understand how to pay royalties on digital downloads. (Oh, and for some reason, most publishers only give you half royalties on digital downloads vs. print books.)

Take books as an example, when I get a royalty statement it often has a line item for "online sales" that is some sort of number that captures the number of sales of a particular book? What does this mean in the context of a subscription service? While I'm sure I could get a straight answer from the publisher, it is usually such little money that it isn't worth the time or effort.

This story is interesting because it suggests that the recording industry knowingly plays a cat and mouse game with artists hiding true sales numbers behind opaque royalty statements (which I will also admit always look as if they were printed by a old dot-matrix printer). The larger issue here is that the publisher often holds all of the power in the relationship between producer and publisher.

Free Books Build an Audience, Just ask the Founder of SAS

From today's NYTimes article on SAS and the challenges it faces from IBM here is an interesting scene. Goodnight built an audience sending free books. Granted, this was before the advent of electronic booksellers, but I'm fascinated by the idea of Goodnight packing up free book shipments and sending them to potential customers. It is exactly the strategy that today's technology companies could learn from. Send your audience something free, they will remember you forever.

From the article:

"THE company traces its roots to a time when computing was costly and for the few. Originally called Statistical Analysis System, it was founded in 1976 by Mr. Goodnight and three colleagues from the agricultural statistics department at North Carolina State University. Its techniques were initially used to calculate the intricacies of soil, weather, seed varieties and other factors to improve crop yields."


"To build an audience, Mr. Goodnight spent nights packing up boxes of computer tapes and manuals, which he sent to university and corporate researchers. Soon, companies wanted him and his academic colleagues to develop software tools tailored for industry. In 1976 at a users’ conference, 300 or so people showed up, many from business."

The Right Price for a Free Book

I've got an interest in the answer to the following question:

What is the right price for a 300-page book that is freely available online?

If you have an opinion, please vote in this poll: http://twtpoll.com/8sgvef.

Some Price Points

Before you vote, here are some data points assuming that you are using a service like Lulu or a Short-run printer:

• The cost to print and bind a 300 pager at Kinkos will approach $35.
• The cost to print 100-copies of a 300 pager at Lulu in a lot of 100 will cost around $10.00 per unit for the content creator.
• The cost to print 100-copies of a 300 pager at a local printer with a turn-around time of 3-5 days is $8.75 per unit.
• The cost to print 100-copies of a 300 pager at a short-run printer with a turn-around time of 4 weeks is about $6.60 per unit.
• The cost to print 1000-copies of a 300 pager at a short-run print will approach something like $4.70 per unit.

Depending on how you do it, distribution costs are probably around $3.00 per unit, and I'm also assuming that the customer pays for shipping.

Some Initial Thoughts

$39.99 is not the right price for a free book, but neither is the correct price the per unit cost. I think the answer is in between, but I'm wondering what people think about this question. There are certain books that people will pay a premium for even though they are available online: The Subversion Book, Maven: The Definitive Guide. Books like these are on foundational tools that people need to use, and I also think that a portion of the audience purchasing the print book might not be aware that the book is available online for free. As free books become more popular as an option for technical authors, I'm looking for some way to price them. My initial guess is that a good price for a printed 300-page book that is available online is about $14.99. Anyone have any thoughts? Your answers will influence some decisions I'm trying to make on the subject.

Some Thoughts on Lulu

Ok, I've been using Lulu for book distribution for a few weeks. First reactions follow.

Where Lulu Works

• Domestic Distribution (US): - I'm frequently sending 40 book shipments throughout the US and Europe. Domestic distribution is a big win for Lulu. Although the site itself states that it should take between 3 and 5 days to print a book, I find that it is consistently taking about 3 days to print an order. With 2 day delivery, I'm finding that my packages get to where I'm sending them on time without an issue.
• Ease of Publishing - They've made it easy to publish books. That's it. If you are looking to publish a book, there's likely no easier interface. They provide the right feedback at the right time, and they give you the resources to get your PDF ready for pre-print.

Where Lulu Fails

• Lulu's Site is Slow - From what I can tell, the management hasn't put an big emphasis on site performance. Lulu's site is constantly taking seconds (sometimes minutes) to load pages.
• Lulu's Order Process has Gaps - Did you make a mistake on the shipping address? Think you can just go back and modify the address immediately after your order has been placed? Think again. If you catch Customer Service at the right moment, you might be able to save yourself right away, but more often than not you are going to have to go through an email-only support channel. When you've just placed a $500 order for books only to have put it on the wrong credit card or shipped it to the wrong address, you'll be looing for a quick way to either cancel or change an order. They don't have it. There are serious gaps in the user interface, there should be ways to fix immediate ordering errors.
• European Distribution Unreliable - I've had European orders sitting in fufillment for more than two weeks. No follow up, no one letting me know where the order is, nothing. Some of the orders I've placed have arrived on time, but most take forever. While I'm happy with the Domestic distribution, I'm never using Lulu for european distribution again. I'm not paying a premium above printing costs for bad service and missed deadlines.

It works, I'm not going to stop using Lulu for smaller orders of around 20-30 books, but I'm likely going to start going direct to a printer and handling my own distribution. Since I'm taking about short-run lot sizes of 100-250, I can get the per unit cost of the book down to a price point that makes sense.

Raiden is a Web Developer

An Odd Side Job During the Summer of 2001

I finally got around to writing this article about my odd job during the Summer of 2001.

Self-publishing experiments (Lulu vs. BookSurge)

Jury is still out, I've decided to do some self-publishing experiments so I can get a sense of what is out there. I've uploaded a book to Lulu (I'm not telling you which one, and it is still a private book, so you can't buy it.) Some initial reactions...

• It is very affordable to self-publish - I'm surprised at how much it costs to print a book wholesale. In fact, if you are not concerned about turn around time, uploading a PDF to Lulu and ordering a one-off copy of your own book is about half the cost of printing a document directly to Kinkos.
• Both Lulu and Booksurge allow you to use your own ISBNs, if I do start using either service for distribution, I'm assuming that it is preferable to have your own ISBNs.... we'll see.
• Signing up for BookSurge generated an almost immediate call from a sales agent, where Lulu is all about self-service. Also BookSurge looks like it has more of an upfront, sign-up fee. I'm going to try both services over the next year, but I think I'll start with Lulu.
• I was looking for a 7" x 9" format which is about one inch wider than US Trade. Lulu doesn't offer this size, the best fit I could get was Royal Quarto @ 7.444" x 9.681". I guess that will do, but I'll have to figure out how that plays out. The problem with US Trade size is that the 6" width is going to mean that I have to trim code examples to less than 80 character-width. We'll see....

New Version of the Maven Definitive Guide

Edition 0.7 is out. You can read it on Scribd or online at the Sonatype site. This edition saw a marked improvement in the rendering of the PDF version of the book with the move to the newer docbkx plugin and the integration of the fop-images-pdf library to allow direct embedding of PDF vector art as figures.

Maven: The Definitive Guide