Discursive

Here's a graph of the traffic breakdown by OS from Google Analytics of the Common Java Cookbook:

Can you guess which colors represent which operating systems?

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".

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.)

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.