Articles About Free Books
Free Forever, or Just For Now?
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Free Forever, or Just For Now?Eric Raymond's name is closely associated with the bazaar model, while Richard Stallman's evokes the cathedral, as demonstrated most dramatically by the contrast between Stallman's HURD kernel project and the Linux kernel. There is another way in which Stallman's unique point of view has been prescient when it comes to free books. One of his key concerns has been how to make sure that once information was set free, it would never be recaptured and made proprietary again. Apparently this focus came from his experience with the Emacs editor --- Stallman wrote the editor, incorporating some code that other programmers had shared with him, and a dispute later arose in which his coauthors tried to keep him from distributing the program freely. Just as Stallman's cathedral style has turned out to be more typical of free books than of free programs, I think his horror of backsliding is more apropos for prose than for code. Free software predates Stallman's invention of copyleft, and old no-license freeware like Donald Knuth's TeX has shown no particular tendency to become unfree (and the Emacs dispute, as far as I can tell, was simply a misunderstanding that could have been avoided if the authors had made an agreement in writing). Books are different. Self-publishing a book is much more difficult than self-publishing a program, and print publishing is a capital-intensive business. Nearly all authors need to work with a publishing house if they want to see their books in print. In most cases, the book contract gives the copyright to the publisher. (There are standard contracts for most types of books, and authors generally have a hard time negotiating any special terms.) Many authors are not willing to copyleft a book because they're afraid it will be a stumbling block if they want to sell it to a publisher later. It's very common to find a free-as-in-beer book available for downloading, but with a note on the author's web page that the book is free ``for now.'' In other words, the day the author gets a book deal, the web page will quietly evaporate, and the book will be gone from the world of free information. I've also seen cases where a book was available in electronic form from the publisher's web site, but later the publisher stopped making it available for downloading. Addison-Wesley, for example, has done this with some of its technical books. One author's web page[8] states, Thanks to the adventurous spirit of our publisher, A K Peters, Ltd., you can now download the entire book "A=B" to yourself right now. [...] This offer is good until April 1, 2000, at which time it may be withdrawn. The book is still available for downloading, but who knows for how long. A book called Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide used to be a free download from the authors' web page, but now it's only available in electronic form through O'Reilly's Safari program, which costs money. R-E-S-P-E-C-TWe respect books. One reason has always been their potential permanence, which makes it especially worrisome that free books have such a tendency to vanish or become unfree. Another reason is economics. In the middle ages, books were awesome objects simply because they cost so much to create --- a rich man could own five or ten. Even after the invention of the printing press, a big initial investment was needed in order to publish a book. The assumption was that if you could get your book published, it must be good. Somehow it had risen to the top of what editors universally refer to as the ``slush pile.'' The World-Wide Web changed all that. The web brought cheap publishing to the masses, so inevitably it cheapened publishing. Nobody is terribly impressed when they hear that I wrote a book and put it on the web --- what impresses them is when they hold the bound, printed object in their hands. We still need a way to tell good books from bad ones, but when it comes to free books, we no longer have a publisher to make an editorial decision. Who is the gatekeeper? We still need intelligent, qualified people to help us sift the wheat from the chaff, but when it comes to free books, the judgment of quality can come after publication, not before. This is a wonderful thing! Top-40 radio is a sample of what you get from the modern media conglomerates if you give them centralized control before publication. The web can make publishing free --- free as in freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility, and that's why I'll end with a request. Please take the time to write a short review of a free book on The Assayer. If you haven't read a free book recently, you might be surprised at how much good reading you can get for free --- browse The Assayer and look for books that have a dandelion flower or bud next to their titles, indicating that they're free. References[1] Ben Crowell, Do Open-Source Books Work? http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/article.html [2] Clifford Lynch, The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html [3] The Assayer http://www.theassayer.org/ [4] On-Line Biophysics Textbook http://www.biophysics.org/btol/. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbook.cgi?book=46 [5] Warren Siegel, Fields http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/errata.html. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbook.cgi?book=51 [6] Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbook.cgi?book=71 [7] Eric Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/taoup/. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbook.cgi?book=200 [8] Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf, Doron Zeilberger, A=B http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wilf/Downld.html. The book can be reviewed on The Assayer http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbook.cgi?book=90 3 All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books3 by Ben Crowell http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/infrastructure.html With the cost of college textbooks up 62% over the last decade,[1] pressure is building for an alternative model of publishing: the free book. Five years ago, an author had to be very persistent --- maybe even a little crazy --- to try the new approach. But now a whole new infrastructure is springing up to make it easier.
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