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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible the author is getting more revenue from that little ad on the right side then from actual sales?

Is it common for O'Reilly authors to release their books this way?

I strongly considered the approach of releasing the contents of my recent book online with Mining the Social Web 2E [1] but instead decided to pursue what I felt was a standard OSS model: release a really high quality version of the source code that's optimized for easy learning in IPython Notebook format (optionally packaged as a turn-key VM) on GitHub [2] with the book being a form of "premium support" for the codebase if people want to learn more or dig deeper. I touch on all of this somewhat in the book's blog's "book as a startup posts" [3], and it seems to be working well so far.

I'm increasingly becoming interested in the prospect of releasing the entire contents of the book (both prose and source code) in IPython Notebook format so that you could read and work in the book seamlessly as "executable paper" like this full-text sampler of Chapter 1 [4] if it were hosted on Wakarii or a similar platform that offers a free tier. It really seems to me that this is the future of tech books: learning platforms with prose and example code integrated seamlessly.

[1] http://amzn.to/GPd59m

[2] https://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Ed...

[3] http://miningthesocialweb.com/category/book-as-a-startup/

[4] http://bit.ly/IW3cbc

It’s an experiment of mine (but I am aware of at least one more O’Reilly book that has been published this way). I’m hoping that it’s win-win: The public version lets people share and link to what they have read (click on a title to create a link to it). And it allows them to figure out whether the book is for them. But I believe that it will also help sell books.

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