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Comment by thebear | Hacker News Reader

Guess there won't be a royalty check for me this year.

I'm totally fine with having our book available for free; actually, I prefer it that way. Yet I find it a bit odd that Springer never even notified any of the authors. I suppose as copyright owners, they can do that.

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How much of a royalty are we talking about in say 2014? Enough for a cup of coffee or for a used VW Golf?

I know that it is rare for modern programming books to make much money for their authors. Thus I imagine for a highly specialized math book it would be even rare.

After the initial excitement ;-) had settled down in the mid-nineties, it was, on order of magnitude, about $100 per year. Every once in a while, an interested mathematician would buy a copy. Other than that, in order to sell such a book, there has to be a graduate level class on the subject at some university (attended typically by about 5 people), and the teacher has to pick your book over a handful of other options.

I haven't kept track of the grand total that I made off the book, but it would certainly be a rather crappy used VW Golf.

I am so far removed from academia now that I have never thought about how I would publish a book like that today. My first impulse would be to make it a free ebook. Web search for "free course textbooks" indicates that this is not unheard of. Does anyone know how common it is, at various levels of higher education?

From what I've experienced, it's common to have mostly expensive texts (for undergrad level) that can reach upwards of $175. Occasionally there are free texts from professors at other universities, or just authors in general. But more often than not they're quite pricey.

Free would be great! I think a lot of students go the alternative route and torrent books or just Google to find their respective .pdf's without paying after they see the price tag at the campus store/amazon/ebay.

I'm in the process of writing a book also. I'm wondering if an author has no saying in this. Can a publisher just decide: I give your book away for free?

What does this mean for publishing in general? 10 years is not much time for good technical books.

It's been so long that I can't even find the agreement that I signed with Springer back then. But I would assume that there was something in there that allows them to do what they did. And since it's more than fine by me that the book is now available for free, I don't care. But if you're concerned about the issue, then, in my opinion, there is only one course of action: have your agreement with the publisher reviewed by a lawyer before you sign it.

You appearently cared so much to make it non-free again. It's now $69.95 instead of a free PDF.

> I'm totally fine with having our book available for free

Really? It's Dec 31th, so you managed to make the book non-free again.

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