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EPUB's, however, can dynamically reflow the text and resize the font to be readable on your phone, your Kindle, your PC, etc. And they're far easier to cleanly convert to other formats (even PDF, if that's your only option) than the reverse direction.
Also, plug: I've available for consulting work on PDF generation (using other libraries or xtopdf, my own toolkit for PDF generation from other formats), and for PDF text extraction work. Contact info in my HN profile.
On the other hand, it respects positioning, fonts, illustrations, and so on -- and is much better printed.
One compromise is to target a reasonable screen size in the PDF layout. Set your margins for a 6" viewable (or whatever you like to optimize for) and you should still get a reasonable experience on a tablet.
markdown -> docx (pandoc)
docx -> kindle (calibre)
I use both pandoc and calibre as offline CLIs, and the resulting kindle book has a nicely formatted table of contents with correct chapter markers, etc.
I think it is (in theory) even allowed to make an EPUB of LaTeX files, except that EPUB readers aren't required to support LaTeX (you're also allowed to provide both HTML and LaTeX, although the W3C probably expected people to use that part of the standard for audio-books).
Most commercial services these days (if my HumbleBundle books from O'Reily are any indication) simply provide pre-compiled editions in EPUB/MOBI/PDF format, as this seems to cover 95% of use cases.
It turns out there's a fair amount of tuning to make math expressions not run off the edge of the page.
FWIW, most of my eBook collection was purchased on Amazon before I got the Kobo, and it's been easy enough to download them all from Amazon and run them through Calibre to get them converted into an EPUB or KEPUB (special subset of EPUB that's better optimized for the Kobo) and get them onto the device.
You can go in the reverse direction as well. I regularly grab ebooks from wherever, strip away the DRM if I have to, convert to MOBI, and then email it as an attachment to the my email address associated with various family members' Kindles.
The problem is, every single .epub reader renders things slightly differently so when you tweak your ePub to make it look good on device A, it ends up looking bad on device B. The fixed layout of PDF is certainly restrictive, but at least it's consistent.
Context: working for past year on producing a decent quality ePub for some equation-heavy books.
But non-fiction often includes plenty of illustrations, sidebars, images, footnotes, and so on, which while EPUB can handle in theory, often wind up with all sorts of bugs in reality, things being out of order or not making sense or being clipped instead of resized when converting to PDF, etc.
I've found PDF's to be generally more reliable overall, and not too much of a problem on my phone for average-sized book pages -- I just hold my phone in landscape mode and pinch to zoom in enough so the phone doesn't waste space on margins on the sides.
The only PDF's that doesn't work for tend to be full-size textbooks (significantly larger than the average book page), but those are also the ones where layout tends to be the most important and I've had the most disastrous experiences with EPUB. Right now I just don't think it's realistic to read most textbooks on your phone in any format. (Plus you want to highlight, annotate in the margins etc., none of which is great on the phone anyways, but is great with a stylus/pencil on your tablet.)
For narrative books I prefer EPUB all the way. Release both if possible!
It also sounds like a lot of books a proofed as a PDF (I hear a surprising amount of publishing is still driven by MS Word). Like the article says, the author may not have a version of the book with proper layout.
> EPUB doesn't let us set a minimum length. EPUB also doesn't have line-folding glyphs. We are unlikely to release an EPUB or MOBI until they offer some way to deal with this problem.
> What big tech publishers do to get around this problem is embed low resolution jpegs of the source code in their EPUBs. This is a terrible solution and we will not put something out that does this.
> There's an e-reader formatted PDF which, on the 4 or 5 different Kindle models we've tested or seen it on, works great. No scrolling, no zooming in and out. Just works. Page turn your way through. For now, we're not going to release an EPUB.
Either all desktop epub readers suck or the format itself is bad, but as an end user, I've never felt pleased with any epub ever. I've tried many readers, configurations, etc (I've even thought about making my own epub reader program that doesn't suck, but I haven't had any time.)
Epubs always look wrong: the formatting is all over the place, fonts look off, I don't even know what font I'm supposed to use. Calibre allows me to use CSS for styling, but I've never managed to do what I need.
I've spent many hours trying to like epub, trying to tweak Calibre so that it doesn't look like complete crap (e.g. setting good margins), but to no avail.
PDFs almost always look fine. I don't have to think about fonts, margins, etc. it just works.
After 300 sales I decided it was better to let hundreds of thousands learn how to save money, than 300.
My only regret is there is no positive feedback.
With a sale, I get an email and paid. With a book view, I barely get analytics.
I suppose my request as an author, give feedback. At least let me know what you like or didn't like.
A nice alternative can be a "pay what you want"approach, with a recommended amount and an option to pay nothing.
Before I pay a $1 and have to log in to PayPal or whatever, I will rather not pay anything, although I value the content.
Interesting effect.
Free is author offering knowledge for free.
Agree with feedback, would be a great motivation to receive positive comments and a chance to improve if it is critical. With novels, we generally leave a rating and possibly a review on goodreads/amazon/etc but with self-published route, that isn't an option.
I'm thinking of conducting live video sessions based on book to get active feedback
If I pay for something, I make sure I make the most of it versus something that is free.
Bookmarked to have a read over the weekend.
The cookbook was my best seller. Hope you enjoy!
IMO, ePub readers have the best justification algorithm: flush left, and the best hyphenation algorithm: never hyphenate. PDFs often force full justification on you, which makes it harder to read because all the line endings have the same spacing, making it easy to lose your position in the text.
I don't have that problem. I find find ragged-right with no hyphenation less pleasant to read and to look at. When I'm reading a novel on my Kindle, I have it set ragged-right because the Kindle doesn't justify well (just word spacing I think). Same on the web. But when I can get good justification and hyphenation, like on a properly typeset PDF or physical book, I prefer it.
But I think there's a synthesis possible between what you mean and what OP meant: ePub readers are somewhat better at adjusting to the reader. "Reader" here in terms of both the device and the actual human. Text can reflow, columns are used only where they make sense, and settings can be changed.
PDFs are better at allowing the creator to, well, create. I know there's a hard core demographic that doesn't believe in any sort visual design. Yet there are topics and authors where choices of placement, font, color etc. are made with intent, and to good effect. Everything Tufte comes to mind.
It should be possible, with something like Apple's Book Author, to create such designs that work well within the e-Book format. But I haven't seen any examples, probably because I rarely read textbooks these days and tend to buy paper copies of such books, anyway.
In as far as I have seen illustrations in non-PDF formats, the results are dismal, with all sorts of sizing problems etc.
Fun epub file trick: rename the file .zip, unzip -a yourbook.zip (double click unzip doesn't work on osx for me for some reason) and check out the html, css, images and xml of your book.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/elements.html
Books that wouldn't work very well as audio books usually won't work well as ePub either. Charts, maps, complex typography, etc., that would be lost in audio form is mostly lost by ePub. I don't know how much of that loss is due to to ePub format, how much due to ePub viewer apps, how much due to ePub creation tools, and how much due to creators just not trying very hard, but the combination makes most high-quality textbooks much better as PDF, which "beach literature" is better as ePub.
This isn’t anything to do with PDF, of course; it’s just representing the baked result of a text rendering process. Your device could do that rendering itself just fine; it’d just take a while (much longer than it takes to change font family/font size and see the result in your favourite eBook reader.)
It’d be interesting to see an ePub-like standard that kept the text as semantic text, and rendered “at runtime”, but not “in realtime”; rather using a set of render preferences you set up before-hand to render the book once when you first download/sync it. Sort of like how runtimes like .NET dynamically recompile downloaded bytecode to native code to “specialize” the code for the device they’re running on. With such an approach, you could rely on a render-model that actually spens time doing good, constraint-based rendering of the text to avoid rivers/widows/orphans/excessive hyphens/etc.
You could get pretty far in cutting down the perceived time of this render by just splitting each work into chapters and rendering a chapter at a time. You would be able to start reading once the first chapter finished rendering. Which, for most normal types of books, on the sort of CPU an eBook-reader has, would “only” take ~10 seconds.
https://github.com/jaroslov/knuth-plass-thoughts/blob/master...
It’s always fascinating how these older algorithms and research is still highly relevant and it’s implementation being debated over.
When it comes to preserving the intended layout, PDF simply translates better.
I am also sensitive to bad typography and sadly most ePub readers fail miserably at this. I don't want a "blob of text" with random font sizes.
I've yet to see a programming book in epub/mobi format that is even reasonably readable
I actually did this for a paper or two, and turns out long math expressions break things, but otherwise not too bad.
I wouldn't mind small page pdfs also being release as well as the large ones.
> As a semantic language, DocBook enables its users to create document content in a presentation-neutral form that captures the logical structure of the content; that content can then be published in a variety of formats, including HTML, XHTML, EPUB, PDF, man pages, Web help[2] and HTML Help, without requiring users to make any changes to the source. In other words, when a document is written in DocBook format it becomes easily portable into other formats. It solves the problem of reformatting by writing it once using XML tags.
I've never understood how to compile to a target format, though.
- (Real-Time Rendering with WebGL2) Just reached out to the publisher. Let's see what happens: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-...
Look at phone apps as an example. We've gotten to a point that many (maybe most) people won't pay $5 for a high quality game that they get hours of usage out of. So the savviest (in terms of making money) developers make games with a freemium model, giving you a basic game for free, but charging you for extras and add-ons. On the face of it, this is fine, since Jack can decide to make a freemium game and Jill can make her game paid. The problem is that Jill now lives in a world where free games are so much the norm that without incredible marketing power, people won't even take a look at her.
The same thing has taken hold in much of the software we use. It's hard to get my boss to agree to pay $300 for a non-open source, but really nifty JS library, because there's an inferior version available for free. Another example is Matlab, which is paid software but is slowly losing marketshare to Python for scientific computing (numpy/scipy). I personally prefer the latter, but when I tried out the former in grad school, I was impressed with how well Matlab was documented and that I could reach out to them and get quick answers if things weren't working as I expected them to (hint: in python/scipy, things were often a little bit off in the code. With matlab, it was usually something I was doing. But it's very helpful to have a paid expert get back to me and tell me that). It's a shame that people have gotten so used to free software that they often won't consider paid software anymore.
I get that for things that involve security, you might want to be able to audit things. And I also think that we 100% need some things to be open standards decided on by the community. I'm not against free software, I'm against people not being able to make a living writing paid software. Or someone spending a lot of time writing a great piece of paid software only for someone to come along and immediately copy them with a free version.
I don't think that the same thing has taken hold yet with books. By and large, people are still willing to pay for these. But I sure hope it stays that way.
EDIT: I agree with many that the length of copyrights is ridiculous. I like the idea of copyright generally, but I think that we need to strike a balance where producing information is rewarded but has its limits. I don't know what the answer should be, but life of author plus 70 years (current rule in the US) seems a bit excessive.
EDIT 2: To show where we area potentially headed, look no further than newspapers. How many newspapers that exist today are going to be viable over the next 20 years? Even local newspapers in major cities are struggling because people today have the expectation that news should be free. I think that there are interesting proposals for government funding that would allow citizens to allocate a share of funds to media outlets of their choice. I haven't really given these much thought. But absent something like that, the future is going to be filled with a small number of big players plus a lot of tabloids, eyeball grabbing headlines, and outright fake news.
That's pretty bad. Every company I've ever worked at allowed anything under $500 to be charged to the company card without prior approval.
There's no question that humanity benefits from free access to information. But humanity also benefits from high quality information, and the way you get there is by rewarding people for producing it. Most great modern literature is the result of publishers who paid authors for their work. Free information is great, but in my opinion, it's not worth losing the literature from Dickens, Tolstoy or Fitzgerald, or countless other great authors whose work is available at a reasonable price and at least some of whom (I'd venture to guess most of whom) might not have written these works without monetary incentive. And that monetary incentive only exists because we grant people exclusive rights to their intellectual property.
There is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works, and indeed there is plenty of evidence that inhibits it. See http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm for a comprehensive look at the subject. While I dont agree with their conclusions, the data they show is solid.
The same goes for many things that are costly to produce, such as movies or investigative journalism. Yes, there are people who are willing to work for free, but it's nonsense to argue that "there is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works". Once upon a time, you had wealthy patrons who were the principle supporters of the arts. The system worked to some extent, but even Jeff Bezos can't afford to foot the bill for every movie made today.
EDIT: yes, game of thrones is heavily pirated, but as the article linked to below points out, the only reason this benefits HBO is that it leads to more subscriptions. In a world without copyright, Netflix could take GOT episodes the second they are created and put them up on its own platform, completely legally. I wonder how many people would pay HBO in that scenario. Right now, the benefit to subscribing to HBO is that you get to watch Game of Thrones legally, with a better viewing experience and you save the hassle of going through seedy torrent sites trying to find a high quality copy. The people who feel a moral obligation to pay for what they consume probably were already subscribers anyway.
https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...
You see, there is a problem with publishing media that relies upon popular reception. Popular reception is perfectly random. There aren't any trends to identify, and no element of the works themselves can be tailored to increase your chances of success with it. It's been extensively studied. The only way publishers are able to fund projects ahead of time that cost so much and still turn a profit on what is essentially a coin flip is because they control distribution. When a terrible flop hits the theaters, they can pull it immediately and replace it with another attempt. When a film finds success, they can keep it in theaters for ages, minimizing their losses and maximizing their gains. The public response to each work is still random, but since they control what is available at the box office, they can still find success.
Now that distribution is so simple a clever 12 year old can do global distribution in their spare time as a hobby, and the publishers don't have control over what options the audience has any more... they are destined to fall apart. It's not the content that made $90m shows possible, and no one remembers the $90m flops. That was entirely a matter of keeping the field of options limited and exercising control over distribution channels.
Even though distribution is cheap, when the product is consumable entertainment, you are competing on the basis of marketing for people's attention, which is a scarce resource. Capital can buy up attention through a variety of means:
* A saturation advertising blitz around release(as was realized with 1989's Batman campaign, and repeated countless times since). Rather than just release the product with a standard press kit, go all out: advertise a pre-event event, like a panel at a fan convention. Make secondary products that serve as loss leaders, each one creating a new advertising hook.
* Bundling and cross-promotional tactics(buy this new graphics card and get a free game!). When you have a large sales organization, you can afford the time and resources to negotiate complex deals of this nature.
* The inflated production values are the product: Avatar was a hit because it was a big, expensive, technically advanced production, and there are only so many of those in the world. Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.
* Franchise marketing: Instead of just having a piece of media, build a collection of IP adaptable to many mediums and release products for all of them, building a new hook for the brand with each release. This gives the same kind of effect as a saturation campaign, but is playing a longer game, and aims to make each release solid and more than a tie-in(e.g. why is Avengers: Endgame a record breaking hit? It's because it's the capstone to a decade of Marvel movies that build up to this moment, all using a consistent style and maintaining a similar level of quality).
While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.
So I don't see an escape from these tactics without a change in the rules of how to capture human attention. Brand building for pop culture is a hugely expensive exercise, and this has made for a market that fights tooth and claw to get a small promotional edge. But like with other lines of business, waves of opportunity come and go that allow new products to get through, and Game of Thrones is one such example of the wave of "prestige TV" that appeared around the end of last decade.
Statistical analysis suggests it is really just the same risk as a small production: 50/50. For every Avatar, there is a Waterworld.
>While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.
That, too, has been extensively studied. For every star-studded mega-hit, there is a star-studded mega-flop... and a mega-hit populated only by unknown first-time actors. Once you look at all the data, there really isn't anything you can do to budge the needle. Big stars will not increase your chances of success. Big budgets will not increase your chances of acclaim. The only studies that have shown actual predictive power before the release of a media property dealt with Tweets sent within 48 hours of the public release. And obviously, it is quite a bit too late at that point to make funding decisions. This fact isn't new, history is littered with tales that show that even those whose sole career it is to spot and publish successful works have horrendous track records. I just read last night that in the 1970s, the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was submitted over 200 times to publishers and once someone did agree to publish it, they expected to make no money on it. It almost instantly became the best-selling philosophy book of all time. Not even the most stellar hit can be spotted beforehand.
The book 'A Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' has a couple chapters about this and I think explains it quite well. The main issue is that the audience is never the same. If a film hits the theater this week versus next week, the available audience is fundamentally just not the same people. Few people go to the theater every single week, so your ability to really nail the tastes of the audience of this weekend won't help you if you release the following weekend. They back this up with research, specifically including research about the factors you mentioned like star power, production budget, etc. The publishing industry has always been ruled by superstition because that's how human beings respond when put in a position of total randomness. They will say that certain publishing companies CEO is a 'tastemaker' and 'knows what the people want'... analysis, however, shows that the CEOs who had this reputation were actually benefitting from the success of projects started under the tenure of the prior CEO, then when the projects they themselves backed got made and didn't perform as well, they "hit a cold streak", left, then the next exec started getting credit for their later projects, and the cycle repeats itself. If you're in that industry and looking to make a career, it's hard to build upon an honest "well, I will roll the dice and hope for the best", so fanciful mythmaking is essentially encouraged.
I'm not aware of research specifically controlling for the random response of the public and examining the influence of marketing alone. It would be interesting to see. A battle for peoples attention is absolutely what it boils down to once the publishers lose control of distribution and can no longer meaningfully restrict what options the audience has which was always their primary means of ensuring a positive return despite random outcomes from each individual effort.
Please, offer the evidence, then. As it is nonsense to claim otherwise, it should be easy to come with unambiguous peer-reviewed research on this. (I'm not actually holding my breath here. All evidence I have ever seen reduces to assuming that IP increases production of immaterial goods. I am happy to be proven wrong here.)
"we find that France, where copyright is introduced, the number of composers per million increased substantially more than in other countries."
I'm cherry picking this quote, but then again, this entire book cherry-picks examples that work in their favor.
I'm not arguing that patent or copyright law are correct. I think the patent system in particular needs a lot of reform. And copyrights are way too long.
What I am arguing is that copyright (specifically, I'm not getting into patents) helps creators profit off of their work, and that profit motive induces people to create content in the first place, at least some of the time. I'll add that from a moral perspective, I think that if you write a book, Amazon shouldn't be able to copy your book and start selling it for free without reimbursing you. Economist Grew Mankiw notes that he spoke with the authors of the book linked to above and asked (I assume jokingly) if they would mind if he made copies of the book and sold them for a profit and the authors didn't feel that that would be fair within the current system.
That doesn't optimize for "literary quality" at all. It optimized for authors like Dan Brown and G. R. R. Martin, authors who can write books than can be converted into media and merchandise with higher profit margins than books.
Or take the Godfather, a movie that cost $6 million to make in 1972, which was a significant sum. Do you think the studios would have put up the money otherwise?
Yes, our current system optimizes for Marvel comics movies and tabloids, but there's also a significant market for high brow stuff, and those people should be entitled to a fair living from the right to exclusively own their work. Otherwise, some of them simply won't be able to afford to that work and we'll lose it.
Before the advent of copyright, we had wealthy patrons who supported the arts. Beethoven had many patrons who helped him along (I have no doubt that he loved doing it, but perhaps wouldn't have been able to without support). But is this system really better than what we have now? It just means that instead of the market dictating what gets made, a select group of wealthy people do. Doesn't seem like an ideal system either.
Finally, there are things like Patreon, which are a more democratic way to support content creators. But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off. Very few people make a decent living off of patreon and even among those who do, how often can they pay expenses such as editors and the other support staff who help to make great art. At least in the old system, you can get some prestige and bragging rights from being the guy who supports Beethoven. However, there's not much prestige in donating $5/month to your favorite author on Patreon (even though I think it's the right thing to do).
Many crowdfunding systems are in fact specifically designed to be resilient against the free-loader problem. The work doesn't get funded at all unless enough people pitch in, and it doesn't cost you anything to "pledge" support for a work that doesn't make its funding threshold. So, it's rational for anyone who has a genuine interest in the work getting made, to pitch in for it - the only agents who get to "free ride" are marginal contributors who would have little interest in the work in the first place.
Rather, I'd argue that crowdfunding (1) is still an emerging model for supporting creators, so we shouldn't be so quick as to label it "unsuccessful" and (2) to the extent that it doesn't routinely fund multi-million dollar content like Game of Thrones-like TV shows or AAA videogames, that's because these media formats themselves are way too costly to make in the first place for users to be willing to transparently fund them - such that they're routinely outcompeted by cheaper alternatives!
No. The question is what's the right way to get there?
> I'll go a step further and say that I think that authors offering up their work for free hurts the entire ecosystem, since it gives consumers the expectation that information is free.
Once produced, information should be free. Doing research, writing it down, making a book, none of that needs to be free.
That works in some cases. I get paid for ghost writing articles and books for business people. They usually publish for free to make themselves look clever. But no one would claim that the result is independent or motivated by artistic creativity.
Your model is fine for hackwork and what is essentially marketing, but that's about all it's fine for. No one would have paid $INSERT_FAVORITE_NOVELIST to research and write their novels if they knew there'd be zero chance of making a return on that investment.
a. Give him 20 dollars, or b. He retroactively erases your favourite book from history
You'd probably pay him.
It's basically patronship. You pay someone to make art for the sake of the art (or social standing, or whatever). It's not perfect (you can't predict reliably whether the artist will make anything good, and there are questions of incentives damaging the art) but it's better than nothing, and these days, with the internet, patronship can be crowd-funded.
It has been successful: I've read several webnovels written as serials whose authors are being supported on patreon by fans, essentially being paid for the act of making directly rather than by selling. It's probably usually a paltry amount, but it's something: it shows some subset of people want to give money to authors when they don't have to (the serials are released for free).
Uh, do you buy novels for RoI? I thought you'd buy them to read and enjoy them. And you'd give novelists money so that they can write a book for you to read and enjoy.
Yes, there is Patreon for supporting creators, but very few people make a decent living this way. And many authors would prefer a publisher who helps them take a risk by fronting money to something like Patreon, where you are at the mercy of your consumers who may or may not give you enough money to create your work.
I guess a hybrid model would be good. If you can get your book to a publisher, they'll pay you that initial signing price, and royalties. Often you get the benefits of their promotion networks. Sometimes you have to agree to book tours or talks depending on the type of book/publisher.
Then after your book has been pulled from print, or it's only printed on-demand from Amazon sales, see if you can give it an open access release. That way an author can get that initial bump of money, plus the possibility of long tail readership.
If you're an author lucky enough to get really popular (with a fiction novel) and your book takes off, obviously the 2nd part won't come about and maybe you should just try to see that it happens in your will after you've past. However few published authors are RR Martins or Kim Robinsons. ... Although, now I wonder what type of world we'd be in if great authors, instead of passing on book rights to their families/estates, arranged for their books to be Creative Commons after they die.
This is a PDF
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/reflections_o...
I would love if I could pay $5 for a high quality game I got hours of use out of.
Currently my only option is to pay $5 for a spin on a shitty slot machine that 95% of the time gives me template trash or a college assignment.
As a result I'm happy to pay $15 for a game on Steam, but I'll agonize forever over a $2 phone game.
Since the audience is small and most of the benefit is early on, I think there's a lot of value in publicly releasing it later. Much like id Software tends to open source their engines about 5 years after release even though they would license and sell it for many thousands of dollars.
About your javascript example. A lot of companies are just very tight with money. I doubt most places I worked would use version control if it wasn't free. Years would go by when we needed to update something like MySQL on a server, but nobody had the time. I'd ask, "Can't we just get a contractor to carry it out? We're all busy and it doesn't make sense to hire someone full time." but that fell on deaf ears. I imagine part of it as mindlessly sticking to a system that has worked for them (only having full time workers and doing everything in house) and part of it is getting burned by wasting money on unused services. I've often seen, "We're paying 10k a year for that? I can install/port an open source version and spend probably 10 hours a year maintaining it"
Personally, I've pushed to open source anything that's not a competitive advantage. I see everyone wasting too much time doing the same thing at multiple companies that just take time away from what we like/want doing and what makes us money.
However in case of professional and academic literature, as much as I would prefer that personally, such approach simply is not maintainable.
The best middle ground I've come across is when author gives out free copies per each request (like a letter from student who can't afford to pay the full amount)
Particularly once that first (and likely only) flush of money has come and gone.
3rd parties can make such books available, though... legally, at least. In that situation, Amazon's TOS (assuming it has something like "thou shalt not redistribute any books purchased from Amazon without Amazon's permission") for ebook buyers would violate the clearly stated book license, so the TOS would become void, right?
Edit: mostly I don't need to or it's obvious https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-do-i-...
This article it seems is mostly where you assigned away your rights to a company if it falls out of publication.
Plus, the freebie can serve double duty as free marketing for the next edition.
At least re-release it for free after the first two or three years. Then, it serves as an advertisement for your skills or the next book you write.
That assumes the book still serves as a good advertisement. Whether it's just because your writing skills have improved or because, for non-fiction, things have changed and your book is very out of date, you may not really want people to judge you by it.
I eventually pulled a book I wrote about 6 years ago because so much had fundamentally changed in the technologies and market dynamics I had written about at the time. (You can actually still get it for free from my website in PDF but it's not really something that would be useful for anyone outside of providing a dated historical snapshot.)