Articles About Free Books

You mean like Wikipedia?

These days the response is, "Oh, you mean like Wikipedia?"

That's progress. In 1950, science fiction author Robert Heinlein (of Stranger in a Strange Land fame) was asked by the editor of a science fiction magazine to make serious predictions of what the world would be like in the year 2000.^[2] At that time, Heinlein's fictional depictions of 2000 featured a lot of flying cars, but in his nonfiction article he did say some sensible things about how progress actually works. Progress is exponential. Over the short term, an exponential curve doesn't look very impressive, and if you extrapolate it linearly, you won't think anything all that exciting is going to happen. But in the long term, the curve goes ballistic. Johann Gutenberg thought his printing press would allow people who weren't quite so rich to have their own Bibles. He would never have imagined the public library, much less the internet.

Giving it away isn't free.

One of those thousand books is Wikipedia, and although it's atypical in many ways, Wikipedia is a particularly dramatic illustration of one of the infrastructural problems I'm talking about: bandwidth. The Wikimedia Foundation depends on an international server farm consisting of over a hundred machines.^[6] On a smaller scale, bandwidth is going to be an issue for anyone serving up a popular, illustrated book. As my own books have been downloaded more and more, my webhosting costs kept escalating, eventually reaching $100 a month.^[7] The authors of one free organic chemistry textbook^[8] have gone so far as to throttle back the load on their server by requiring prospective readers to register and give an e-mail address before they can access the book. The problem is that many of those prospective readers will balk, and that will keep the book from gaining mind-share --- college professors are used to being courted assiduously by book reps, and to getting so many unsolicited books sent to them by publishers that they can use them as doorstops.

I've also learned what a capital-intensive business print publishing is. With traditional printing technology, the unit cost goes down dramatically as the length of the press run increases, and that economic imperative meant that I soon had about $10,000 invested in a closet full of books. Meanwhile, my wife, who handles the family finances, was warning me that I was losing money. Webhosting, printing, and advertising were adding up to more than I was bringing in.

the new infrastructure

One justification offered by publishers for the astronomical prices of college textbooks is the high cost of permissions fees for materials such as photographs, artwork, or anthologized text. Since September 2004, the free information community has had a weapon in its arsenal that's unavailable to traditional publishers: Wikimedia Commons, a repository containing hundreds of thousands of photos.^[9] Since most of the images are under copyleft licenses, they can be used in copylefted free books, but not in traditional copyrighted books. Although five years ago many of us who were interested in free books envisioned the sharing of copylefted words, in fact it looks like the commonest currency of collaboration is turning out to be not text but pictures. A positive development related to this has been the increasing standardization of licenses. There's a pretty clear consensus these days that new copylefted materials should be licensed either under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license or the GNU Free Documentation License, or both.^[10] As a textbook author, dual licensing my books under these two licences allows me to legally use essentially 100% of the contents of Wikimedia Commons. Even for an author who has no particular interest in free information as an abstract ideal, the use of non-proprietary photos opens up the possibility of using free digital copies of a book as sales tools. That's an option that traditional publishers don't have, because permissions fees are computed according to how widely the book is distributed.^[11]

But even if there's no legal objection to giving your book away for free, there's still that pesky issue of the cost of bandwidth. Luckily there's some new infrastructure coming along to take care of this as well. Jason Turgeon has founded a site called textbookrevolution.org,^[12] whose mission is to mirror free books and take the load off of authors. The Wikibooks project, which aims to extend the success of Wikipedia to the creation of a whole library of books, is backed by the horsepower of the Wikimedia Foundation server farm. And finally, there's an interesting company called lulu.com,^[13] dating back to 2002, which is opening up new possibilities for distributing books, both electronically and in print.