The Universe of Discourse : Why my book can be downloaded for free
The Universe of Discourse
Mark Dominus (陶敏修)
mjd@pobox.com
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Update: Here I am at the Sagrada Família<br>Egyptian fractions for 2/105<br>Did Ahmes find the best expansions for 2/n?<br>Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other<br>How are John Waters movies like James Bond movies?<br>Documentation is a message in a bottle<br>Bo Diddley<br>Language models imply world models<br>John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds<br>Crooked politicians love crab cakes!<br>Almost-trivial theorems<br>An anecdote about backward compatibility
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Mon, 01 Dec 2014
Why my book can be downloaded for free
People are frequently surprised that my book, Higher-Order<br>Perl, is available as a free download<br>from my web site. They ask if it<br>spoiled my sales, or if it was hard to convince the publisher. No and<br>no.
I sent the HOP proposal to five publishers, expecting that two or three would<br>turn it down, and that I would pick from the remaining two or three,<br>but somewhat to my dismay, all five offered to publish it, and I had<br>to decide who.
One of the five publishers was Morgan Kaufmann. I had never heard of<br>Morgan Kaufmann, but one day around 2002 I was reading the web site of<br>Philip Greenspun. Greenspun<br>was incredibly grouchy. He found fault with everything. But he had<br>nothing but praise for Morgan Kaufmann. I thought that if Morgan<br>Kaufmann had pleased Greenspun, who was nearly impossible to please,<br>then they must be really good, so I sent them the proposal. (They<br>eventually published the book, and did a superb job; I have never<br>regretted choosing them.)
But not only Morgan Kaufmann but four other publishers had offered to<br>publish the book. So I asked a number of people for advice. I<br>happened to be in London one week and Greenspun was giving a talk<br>there, which I went to see. After the talk I introduced myself and<br>asked for his advice about picking the publisher.
Greenspun reiterated his support for Morgan Kaufmann, but added that<br>the publisher was not important. Instead, he said, I should make sure<br>to negotiate permission to make the book available for free on my web<br>site. He told me that compared with the effort that you put into the<br>book, the money you get back is insignificant. So if you write a book<br>it should not be because you want to make a lot of money from it but<br>because you have an idea that you want to present to the world. And<br>as an author, you owe it to yourself to get your idea in front of as<br>many people as possible. By putting the book in your web site, you<br>make it available to many people who would not otherwise have access<br>to it: poor people, high school students, people in developing<br>countries, and so on.
I thought that Greenspun's idea made sense; I wanted my ideas about<br>programming to get to as many people as possible. Also, demanding<br>that I make the book available on my web site for free seemed like a<br>good way to narrow down the five publishers to two or three.
The first part of that plan worked out well. The second part not so<br>well: all five publishers agreed. Some agreed reluctantly and some<br>agreed willingly, but they all agreed. Eventually I had the book<br>published by Morgan Kaufmann, and after a delay that seemed long at<br>the time but in retrospect seems not so long, I put the book on my web<br>site. It has been downloaded many times. (It's hard to say how many,<br>since browsers often download just the portion of the PDF file that<br>they need to display.)
Would the book have made more money if it were not available as a free<br>download? We can't know for sure, but I don't think so. The book has<br>always sold well, and has made a significant amount of money for me<br>and for Morgan Kaufmann. The amount I made is small compared to the<br>amount of work I had to put in, just as Greenspun said, but it was<br>nothing to sneeze at either. Even now, ten years later, it is still<br>selling and I still get a royalty check every six months. For my book<br>to have lasted ten years is extremely rare. Most computer books<br>disappear without a trace after six months.
Part of this is that it's an unusually good book. But I think the<br>longevity is partly because it is available as a free<br>download. Imagine that person A asks a question on an Internet forum,<br>and person B says...