Copy This Book. An artist’s guide to copyright
copy-this-book.eu
copy-this-book.eu
Making good on the title, the book was created with open source tools (html2print, similar to page.js) and is licensed CC-BY-NC. The size also fits snugly under a photocopier.
One question: what would be your opinion if somebody were to post here a public link to a pdf copy of the book?
There’s fairly little marketing, it all hangs on the publisher having good connections with distributors, that have good relations with book stores, and then have a pitch and cover design that are convincing enough for these book stores to stock.
As someone often creating digital content, I was impressed by how well these networks function. The book does not have a lot of online presence, yet it still found its way around the world.
When it comes to the digital version, I made it myself, because I figured that it also needed to circulate this way and that it talks to another audience. However, not doing much marketing for it other than posting on social media, there are very little sales. Visits to the website don’t really convert to eBook sales, so I think the audience I have at the moment prefers the physical medium. In posting on Hacker News I was curious if this was going to be different.
When it comes to the license, it permits people sharing the PDF. Ideally for me this means people mailing it to their friends, but I think it includes hosting on a public platform too. Because of the NC clause, to be sure the platform that hosts it should also be non-commercial, so I imagine someone could share it on their personal blog for example. This will probably happen at some point. It’s a bit of an ambiguous feeling, I realise it’s a consequence of the choice I made and that it will help the material reach more people, at the same time it doesn’t feel great to loose control. At least I hope I’ll be good enough at SEO so that people continue to realise it exists for sale :) After all that’s how paying for digital media often works, as a decision to want to support the author rather than a necessity to access the content.
It definitely does!
It was a bit surprising that you did not offer a freely downloadable pdf file for the book yourself. Anyhow, if the book is minimally relevant it will appear on library genesis for all to see. Time to stop pretending that this does not happen.
For an anecdotal data point, I systematically buy one or more printed copies of scientific and technical books whose authors distribute freely a digital copy. For example, GNU manuals and FSF publications, as well as many math books, including quite famous text books (my favorite, Ian MacKay inference textbook where you can download even the .tex sources!).
I still hesitate where to buy the physical copy of your book, though. It sells in amazon for 25EUR, but the sole review says that it is a low-quality print-on-demand thing. I would happily pay 50EUR if I was sure to obtain a high-quality print, well bound, with crisp text and figures and pages that do not fall apart. But then again, I'm a fastidious bibliophile and probably not representative at all.
Since the book sells mainly in art book shops I’d say you are representative of its public in the sense that the physical and visual design aims to be solid and at a higher level than for ex. most technical books. It’s offset printed, generous margins, nice paper stock, the spine is supple.
It’s not easy for me to know what happened with the copy the Amazon reviewer got. Since Amazon sold them this copy I’d expect them to reply and fix the problem (send a new book) but that’s probably too much to expect!
The chain is long, and I can’t 100% guarantee you that a bookshop sells you a copy in good shape but it should be no problem to return a misprinted one.
> It was a bit surprising that you did not offer a freely downloadable pdf file for the book yourself. Anyhow, if the book is minimally relevant it will appear on library genesis for all to see. Time to stop pretending that this does not happen.
My initial idea with having the eBook for sale instead of for free was that indeed it would pop up on Library Genesis, and for once the license actually allows it, but people would also buy it, giving me an extra income stream (I make more from an eBook than a physical book) and not making the publisher too nervous (after all, they might think that the free PDF would eat into sales of the physical book). It’s quite possible I’ll change this in the future, I’m evaluating it.
"I’m the schrijver of this book."
nice lastname!
Then again, back when the name was first introduced, it probably didn’t refer to author in the modern sense, but to a person in the community who, unlike most, was literate (knew how to read and write).
interesting!
She’s a designer / writer / teacher / curator who wrote and designed some amazing books including Thinking With Type. I did one of the things she suggests, make a sample chapter that would be indicative both of the writing and design: https://ericschrijver.nl/assets/legal_advice_for_artists_sam...
Of course that’s a lot of work, I did have some funding for this stage as part of a talent development grant of the Cultural Industries Fund NL. I could have sent the proposal to many publishers but I soon tried with Onomatopee. They’re quite a small outfit but they have a good reputation for visual art and graphic design books. With publishing getting easier, I feel both shops, critics and the public rely even more on the reputation of publishers, record labels etc. as a proxy for quality.
That’s a bit ironic, but it also makes sense, because you need all the help you can get if you want to somehow sift through the wealth of material that’s being published each day.
Working with a small publisher, I figured it would be easier to get the book out without too much compromises. My hunch was that a large publisher might be scared of having a CC license, using repurposed images etcetera. I haven’t tried so I don’t know! I tend to think one of the advantages of a mainstream publisher would be that they can devote more resources to press (there wasn’t so much for this book). But my publisher has proven really effective in getting it into specialist bookshops so I’m quite happy.
PS: they also didn’t require copyright transfer, which is great! Money-wise, each project they do starts with a big spreadsheet to see what is possible. Of course you want to have an affordable price, a nice printing, solid copy editing, decent remuneration for the author, but it can be difficult to have everything at once so you start tweaking variables until you have something where your break even point seems attainable. I managed the collaboration with the copy editor, designer and printer myself. I’m a designer too so it felt good to have this control. This might be unusual in larger publishing houses but in the world of art book publishing I think it’s not uncommon.
Maybe worth putting a prominent NSFW label on the link to the excerpt however? Was not what I was expecting to see when reading this!
(Chapter 5.2 on writing)
So she thought of Abbie Hoffman… but when she suggested it my first association was System of a Down as well :)
I love those Richard Prince Instagram screenshots too, no shame.
So there’s a practical impetus for getting to know these rules. The book is indeed full of practical advice on how to work within them. But in doing so, it also explains the paradoxes of copyright, and I hope, sows the seeds for a more critical attitude towards it.
You obviously already have a critical attitude, but for most artists it’s not so pronounced, and also more ambiguous: many artists are quite happy to support copyright, as long as it protects their work, however, they’re not quite so happy with copyright protecting the work of others when they want to use it as part of their own. I hope the readers challenge their intuitions a bit.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc
She's made that an integral part of her work, including particularly Seder Masochism:
Full movie: https://archive.org/details/sedermasochism/
[0] This is why you have lots of bots that steal Twitter art and resell it as T-shirts or NFTs.
Sorry. Looks like a decent read. $11 is not a big deal, but being slapped into yet another spambase is.
I deliberately did not go the route of the walled garden stores (iBooks Kindle etc.) since I liked the idea of providing DRM free files.
Thanks for your feedback though. What would you suggest as a way for indie authors to sell eBooks?
I'm used to just being sent directly to PayPal, clicking "Go For It" (or whatever), and then being redirected to your site.
Eric Schrijver, the author, also runs a great blog titled “I Like Tight Pants and Mathematics”. Post archive here: https://i.liketightpants.net/and/archives
I've bought many print works after reading all or part of a free digital version or borrowed copy. Perhaps I'll do the same for this.