Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

>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.

Apologies of you've answered this elsewhere, but is the eBook DRM-free?

Yes! Personally I don’t like DRM at all. It makes the legitimate product inferior to the pirated copy, which used to never be the case. And I like the idea of my work surviving migrations between devices and operating systems.

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