Suggestion: Release your book as an EPUB rather than a PDF. PDF has the reputation of being view-able "everywhere", but it's not exactly pleasant to read on anything other than a computer screen or a large tablet.
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.
If the book is pure text (like fiction), then sure.
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.)
If the book contains lots of equations, ePub is not the best. The best thing I've found is https://github.com/softcover/softcover which can generate pretty decent ePub/mobi with math as images, but still not as good as latex-produced PDF.
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.
This. I recently subscribed specifically to some Google website, including all my work related info, to get an ebook on the state of Kubernetes. I was looking forward to it... And then they send me a PDF which is completely unreadable on my Kindle and I'm not going to read a whole book on my laptop. I really hate it when people call PDFs ebooks. Sorry :)
It really depends. Kindles are great if you're flowing a bunch of text. They can work fine with more graphics (although you're mostly back to using a tablet again) but the e-version really needs to be properly designed for it--e.g. avoiding sidebars and that sort of thing. Just a low-effort conversion can look pretty awful.
I have to disagree that they work fine with graphics, especially in low light conditions. It's downright terrible in my opinion. I have a kindle version of Calculus: Better Explained, and it's unreadable on my Paperwhite. I have to resort to the kindle app on a tablet or PC.
I actually agree with you. I was being sloppy. Kindle format can work fine with photos/graphics on a tablet and even a smartphone. (I've actually come around to mostly liking eguidebooks because they're right on my phone and I don't need to xerox the relevant pages to carry around.) But, much as I like my Paperwhite, it's really just for reading text.
Have you checked if Calibre or pandoc or any other ebook format conversion tool can get you the format you want? Calibre was mentioned on HN recently (probably earlier too) and pandoc keeps getting mentioned. Both have been around for a while.
It's very much possible to extract legible (as you put it) data from PDF. It's just that it does not work 100% accurately 100% of the time. (And different libraries have different levels of accuracy.) But this is due to issues inherent in the PDF format. I know this because I worked on a project to extract text from PDF, for a startup client. They first gave me the work of researching various PDF text extraction libraries, hands-on, and evaluating them, and recommending one of them for use. I did that. Then based on that recommendation and report I gave them, they gave me the further work of using that library (from C), to extract text from a bunch of PDFs of financial data (think SEC data, EDGAR and the like - it was a fintech startup), and also further work of more processing of the extracted text data with Python. As part of all that work, I found that sometimes the text extraction was inaccurate, reported some bugs in the library (xpdf) to the company that makes it (Glyph and Cog), they fixed those bugs, etc. From discussions with one of the technical founders of G&C I got to know of these inherent issues, such as characters sometimes getting transposed, junk characters creeping into the output, etc.
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.
> Release your book as an EPUB rather than a PDF. PDF has the reputation of being view-able "everywhere", but it's not exactly pleasant to read on anything other than a computer screen or a large tablet.
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.
If you're giving the book away, why not release the source (LaTeX, Word, whatever) in addition to your favorite subset of {PDF,EPUB,...}? Then readers who want a different format have a better chance of being able to produce it themselves.
If used well EPUB is suitable as the source (more than Word anyway). It's generally just HTML with some metadata.
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).
Outside of dedicated enthusiasts, I don't think the average reader wants to take the time to "compile" their book.
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.
>Suggestion: Release your book as an EPUB rather than a PDF. PDF has the reputation of being view-able "everywhere", but it's not exactly pleasant to read on anything other than a computer screen or a large tablet.
On the other hand, it respects positioning, fonts, illustrations, and so on -- and is much better printed.
When I first got into ebooks I tried buying everything in them. It really sucks when you have a reference book at home, but you need it at work. Unfortunately, code formatting is often terrible for ebooks--reflow ruins it. So I tend to prefer the PDF or a hard copy for anything that contains code.
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.
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.
> 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.
How does pandoc compare to grip? I often need to render Markdown to PDF and find Grip is _ok_ but not great, and if I'm not mistaken it renders Github-side, where I'd prefer offline.
for those who might wonder, like me:
https://github.com/joeyespo/grip
a command-line server application written in Python that uses the GitHub markdown API to render a local readme file.
I've never tried grip, but actually my pipeline is this:
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 haven't used grip, but pandoc primarily (exclusively?) generates PDFs through LaTeX. It's great for quick, programmable, PDF generation, but personally, I usually prefer using pandoc to go markdown -> ICML -> InDesign.
I agree with you on all accounts. I love epub for these exact reasons. However, Amazon doesn't support it. It's one of the reasons I haven't and I won't buy another Kindle when my current one dies (4 year old and the battery barely lasts 3 days). Was looking after the kobo but I heard mixed reviews about it's reliability so I'll end up reading all my stuff on the ipad.. I hope my eyes will not fight back.
I've had a Kobo Clara HD for about a month, so I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about it.
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.
Even better suggestion, If you've used Markdown or similar to write the book, relese the source (and an artifact, i.e. EPUB). I have seen so many books that I wanted to read but couldn't, because EPUB and PDF aren't great when it comes to accessibility, particularly with maths and diagrams. Getting access to the Markdown source usually solved all of my problems.
I do the opposite, I release my books for free for a few days and then put the price I want to.
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
Haven't read your book so I can't comment on the execution but from a bit of a look at your site it definitely seems very interesting. Topic wise you're killing it.
My book costs $20.95 hardcover/10.95 paperback on Amazon. When Kindle books and the Kindle went live, I added a Kindle version. I wanted to make it free, but Amazon mandates a minimum price of 99 cents, so that's what it costs.
Thanks for this. Food is not an overly large item in my budget (~11% net) but with my life being just me and my son 182.5 days out of the year, I'm definitely interested in applying some engineering to my grocery list.
In my experience, even just $1 would have a significant chilling effect. And making the book available for free has the benefit of helping those who don't have credit cards (due to e.g. geography, socioeconomics or age).
A nice alternative can be a "pay what you want"approach, with a recommended amount and an option to pay nothing.
I would imagine the credit card usage forms the majority of the chilling effect. Personally, I find it a lot more annoying to faff around with using the credit card to pay for something (even when I consider the cost negligible) than to just download it.
I'd urge writers to release in as many formats as possible. Personally, I prefer reading PDFs on my iPad because the typography is often superior to ePub readers.
I'm reading the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language at the moment. It has a complex layout with varied typography, examples with subscripts and superscripts, text that's left, center, and right aligned, callout boxes, sidebars, diagrams, tables, multiple heading levels, footnotes and so on. ePub simply can't handle complex layouts or typographic requirements beyond those you'd find in a novel. Also, the justification and hyphenation algorithms in ePub readers are typically complete crap.
Yes, I find there are two kinds of books, those that would work as audio books and those that wouldn't. Those that work as audio books also work well as ePub and, in fact, are better in ePub form than as PDF, because I have more control over the presentation.
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.
I think ePub's can handle everything you mentioned, ePub's are just XHTML, and a subset of css [1]. Not sure about callout boxes, I don't know exactly what subset of elements are available as I've never written one, but everything else you've mentioned looks to be available [2].
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.
While ePubs can handle more complicated layouts, it's much easier to take an existing print book layout and export to PDF and have it retain the formatting than it is to do the same with ePub. So to export the same layout to ePub, you basically need a web designer to go over it and mark up the parts correctly and write the right CSS. Exporting to PDF is pretty much one step and you're done.
>the justification and hyphenation algorithms in ePub readers are typically complete crap.
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 actually doubt that "flush left only" and "no hyphenation" are the only, or even standard, options for most readers.
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.
> 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.
The CSS text-reflow engine (which ePub relies upon) doesn’t spend nearly as much time on the layout of your page as e.g. LaTeX. Thus, the results are vastly subpar to putting the book through a professional rendering engine, outputting to PDF with a page size targeted to the given device.
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.
There was an interesting conversation about the performance of line breaking algorithms recently. David Fuchs — who worked with Knuth on the line breaking algorithms in Tex — commented that the algorithm in Tex isn't especially performance intensive. It's not included in browsers because high-quality line breaking doesn't play well with floats.
Thanks for the shout-out, but all the credit for the line-breaking in TeX goes to Knuth and Plass; I was just in the nearby vicinity, and like to make authoritative pronouncements. The linked comments do represent my accurate measurements of running the unadulterated TeX code from Knuth's hand on modern hardware.
I found this great overview of the algorithm which similarly addresses what your comment mentions about it being quadratic is a ‘commonly known fact’ by programmers but is not really true:
As another datapoint, Knuth-Plass style line breaking is implemented on Android TextView and turned on by default, as of Marshmallow I think. There is a bit of a performance cost, but I personally never came across anybody who turned it off to gain more speed.
That assumes it's just a flow. A lot of the time books have sidebars and other elements that don't just flow into an ePub. Footnotes also don't work as well.
I'd much rather have a PDF. I can open it in Documents (from Readdle), which is super-fast and lets me quickly page through large documents, which is essential for reference-type material or textbooks.
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.
Some books are not meant to have any changes to fonts, size or reflow. "House of Leaves" is one example of a book formatted specifically for printed books which does not translate well to ePub. (source: I read this book in epub)
When it comes to preserving the intended layout, PDF simply translates better.
In that spirit, wasn't DocBook designed to be a source language for as many formats as possible? The Wikipedia article[1] says:
> 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.
Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work? 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.
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.
I had the feeling the author was talking about out-of-print books. It was talked about a bit, but that wasn't the main emphasis.
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.
I think technical books are a bit different than a lot of other books. They generally have a smaller audience and are most valid for a year or two. These and text books (for core subjects) have always been around $50-$100. More niche books or reference books are many times more.
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.
> Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
He's not talking about ROI for the consumer, he's talking about ROI for the author who put time into writing a novel. Take Dickens, who was famously opposed to the lack of copyright laws in America at the time and felt that he was getting cheated by people who read his work without paying him. I wonder how many people sent him money out of good will?
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.
If a genie came up to you, demonstrated its powers to your satisfaction, and then gave you the choice:
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).
As you say, it's usually a paltry amount. I doubt that many make a a decent living off of this let alone enough to pay support staff such as editors and the like. The biggest issue is the free rider one... why should I pay you when others will pay and I'll get the same benefit. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do (I personally voluntarily contribute to several podcast creators who I like) but it's reality.
I saw an article that about 2% of Patreon patronees make above federal minimum wage which is still way below a living wage. There are a tiny handful who make a lot, but for the most part this isn't a model that is working for people who want this to be their main source of income.
Most books aren't really profitable. Even for the publishers the only really profitable books are few and far between, especially for non-fiction. The main benefit most authors gain seems to be to stake their claim as "expert" and charge higher rates/start consulting on this basis.
> Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.
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.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."—Stewart Brand, in a conversation with Steve Wozniak, recorded by Steven Levy at the first hackers conference in 1984. Source: https://digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be-fr...
I firmly disagree with pretty much everything you have said.
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.
Let's take Game of Thrones, a show that I'm sure many people reading this thread watch. The final season cost $90m to make. Would this investment have been made if not for intellectual property rights that give HBO exclusive license to distribute the content? If Amazon, Google and Netflix could just take the work and distribute it for free, then would HBO have been willing to fund this?
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.
You are entering into a much more complicated territory there. The reason things like $90m TV shows and $200m movies get made is due to history. Solving distribution, getting things from point A to point B, was the hardest and most valuable problem to solve, bar none, for a century. It built empires. It made the publishing system that we're familiar with (and growing out of) possible.
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.
This isn't correct. $90 million TV shows exist because after a studio creates that show, they have the exclusive legal right to sell it to distribute that content. Otherwise, nothing stops Netflix from just taking Game of Thrones for free and putting it on their own platform.
I think you're side-stepping the issue. If no one is interested in watching the $90m show, it fails regardless of whether everyone or only one outlet can make it available. It has to have public popularity in order to even get to the starting line of there being some contention over which avenue through which it is distributed.
The actual outcomes of cheaper distribution have been realized as less equal outcomes: the biggest hits are bigger than ever, the rest are part of an ever-increasing undiscovered long tail.
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.
>Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.
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.
Game of Thrones is a pretty bad example to use. Year after year it is one of the most pirated shows out there, which HBO tacitly approves of. Far more people watch the show for free than actually pay for it, but HBO still indirectly benefits from this massive popularity.
Erm...I don't think Game of Thrones is what the OP is talking about. You're talking about entertainment, and GP is talking about "information" in the context that "Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it". Is humanity benefiting from watching actors enact stage combat scenes with makeup and costumes?
I tend to agree with you on this specific example, but there's also plenty of work that IS good quality in my opinion that wouldn't get funded if the entity funding it didn't get exclusive access to distribute. I would say that the New York Times (or pick your favorite paper) is a good example of this. There's a good amount of quality writing that people don't get paid for out there, but funding things like investigative pieces that take months or years to research just doesn't happen much outside of well-funded newspapers that traditionally get that funding because they are the owners of the copyright, so if you want the info, you need to pay them.
> it's nonsense to argue that "there is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works"
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.)
Sure, I'll quote the original source linked to above from economist David Levine (who makes the case against copyright):
"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's not how capitalism works. The profit incentive, in it's most idealized form, produces books that make money, written by people who make more money writing books than anything else.
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.
The quality stuff also doesn't get written without copyright. Take Charles Dickens, who rallied against pirating of his works. Luckily he had the protection of British copyright law, so he still had motivation to publish.
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).
> 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.
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!
I'd agree with this. But in that case it isn't free information. I mostly take people issue with people who say that all information should be free, yet still expect there to be a viable way to make the economic incentives right. Crowd sourcing doesn't really work for that.
That monetary incentive is automatically induced in a capitalist society. When people have to pull their own weight, buy their own food + necessities etc, no one can reasonably be expected to spend hours producing high quality information for free.
I agree with author's point in regard of fiction/non fiction literature, as it gets traction among readers there is a better chance to sell a hard copy or get a citation.
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)
Oh, the post points out that Physically Based Rendering is free now (a 2016 book). I'm not even mad. It was worth the steep price it originally cost. If you're interested in rendering based on physics, it's excellent. If you're interested in "literate coding" where the manuscript and the source code are the same thing, it is stellar as that is the way it was built. I highly recommend it.
I support this in principle, but doesn't Amazon require that you not sell the book anywhere for less than the Amazon price? I'm pretty sure that means you can't give it away for free, either. I think that's why, although some books that are sold for money on Amazon are creative commons licensed, you won't generally find them on the authors' websites. It's legal, but I think it's a violation of the author or publisher's contract with Amazon to do that.
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?
The rules for self-published books on amazon and the rules for publishers are very different. if you have a book published through KDP you almost certainly can't offer it for free, but if you're published through through one of the big 5 then you can do whatever your deal with the publisher says.
I don't know what the TOS looks like, but Amazon is currently charging for books that are free on Project Gutenberg. Amazon does not seem to have a problem with making money on otherwise free books.
On a side topic, how does one arrange the rights for a self published book (ie If I write a book but publish myself is putting "(c) Paul" good enough?)
Read your contract before signing. For my two most recent books I retain the right to buy the publisher out (not a traditional publisher but one serving the self-pub market).
What a great reminder to authors that it's possible. Especially in tech, since the various technologies get replaced so quickly - quite a few books barely sell out the first printing before they're already obsolete. Why not put them up online for free after that.
Plus, the freebie can serve double duty as free marketing for the next edition.
Very, very few authors make enough off of their books to live on. They write a book, make a few hundred or a few thousand off of it, the book goes out of print, they're forgotten.
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.
>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.)
While it can confuse things to have out of date documentation out there. I often get stuck with setups using out of date software. Maybe it's 1% of 1% of users, but finding good references for out of date stuff is so nice.
I totally agree. When maintaining ancient software, I usually have to end up hunting for the source of the dependencies just to regenerate the documentation. Time is not linear.
Why do publishers agree to rights reversion? It reduces heir opportunity to directly profit and it increases competition for their other books they sell.
Most books (especially more than a year in) aren't actually a profit opportunity, and the effect of increasing competition for their other books is small enough to be totally negligible (at least in the current state of the market). And, as the other comment said, free ebooks can drive book sales.
It's often in the writer's contract that rights revert after a certain period, or if the book goes out of print, or if the publisher has not exercised the rights in the contract. Even if it isn't, a digital version might increase sales of a physical version, and some money is better than none.
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.