Why my book can be downloaded for free • Hacker News Board

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#51

Post by mcguire » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 5:55 PM UTC

adrianhoward wrote: post #30

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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 exp…

"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." I'm not directly in…

"See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... and http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-... for some examples of real world publisher cost breakdowns."

The first link is (a) talking about John Grisham, not technical books or even most fiction ("$2.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping galleys to journalists"), and (b) double counting the wholesaler/distributor ("$2.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen who handle distrobution for publishers" as well as "Most books are sold to retailers at X% discount of the cover price by the wholesalers. ... [S]o we can assume a midlist novel might be 20-30%").

The five thoughts at the end of the second are...interesting:

"There are a lot more stages and costs than anyone would imagine.

"This convoluted process can be optimized in innumerable ways – Mr. Bezos would be hard pressed to find a more ‘improvable/kaizenable’ business model.

"Everyone who works for publishing companies claims that there is little money to be made and everyone does it for the love of it. Not sure if this is a function of profits not being shared with employees or there simply are no profits.

"There is huge consolidation of power...

"The number of people employed is staggering. A bail-out for Publishing doesn’t seem as crazy an idea.

"[There are immediately obvious optimization opportunities.]"

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#52

Post by lsiebert » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 6:15 PM UTC

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.

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#53

Post by mjd » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 6:51 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #49

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 cove…

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

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#54

Post by DennisP » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 7:43 PM UTC

jeremysmyth wrote: post #3

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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 exp…

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 worl…

As someone who once tech-reviewed a Microsoft Press book, I don't see how there's any economy of scale there. They just hired me as a freelancer, after seeing a post I made on a forum.

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#55

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 7:54 PM UTC

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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 exp…

[deleted]

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#56

Post by vram22 » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 8:07 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #16

"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…

>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).

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#57

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 9:25 PM UTC

vram22 wrote: post #56

SwellJoe wrote: post #16

"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…

>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).

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

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#58

Post by chetanahuja » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 11:50 PM UTC

"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 )

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#59

Post by thret » Thu, Dec 04, 2014, 1:00 AM UTC

bphogan wrote: post #28

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

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 exp…

I think the point you make about an editor is incredibly important. I've gotten quite a few books from self-published authors - including some pretty big names in the programming world - who are adamant that they can do it all themselves, and the prose is a train wreck. It's not just about catching typos - it's the actual developmental editing that needs to happen. Ensuring things are in the right order. Ensuring the…

Even good - even great - writers need an editor. When you already know what you have written it can be easy to miss what is actually there.

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#60

Post by SwellJoe » Thu, Dec 04, 2014, 1:14 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #16

"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…

Some of those other languages with translated examples:

JavaScript: http://interglacial.com/hoj/hoj.html

Ruby: http://graysoftinc.com/higher-order-ruby

Python: http://dustbunnylair.blogspot.com/2009/01/higher-order-perl-...

Go: http://higherordergo.blogspot.com/