[DMCA-Activists] Free Books

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from TransHumanTech list.  Some interesting
angles here.  -- Seth)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 14:27:44 +0200 (CEST)
From: Eugen Leitl <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>


> http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/sneaky.html

Free Books: A Sneaky Success

by Ben Crowell


At the height of the dot-com bubble, twenty-somethings with
goatees were  telling us that e-books were the wave of the
future. Those e-books they  had in mind were like
proprietary software: they weren't free  (-as-in-anything),
they only worked on proprietary hardware, and they came 
with shrinkwrap licenses and digital rights management. They
failed. The  successful model that's sneaking under the
radar is the copylefted book.

This article is copyright 2002 by Benjamin Crowell, and is
open-content  licensed under the GFDL 1.1 license

Two years ago, the idea of a free book --- a book whose
author had  intentionally made it free on the internet ---
was largely unknown and  untested.[1] Looming on the horizon
instead, with every prospect of  success, were the
"anti-books:" electronic books encumbered with odious 
licensing terms and restrictive digital rights management
technology.[2]  You wouldn't be able to loan such a book to
a friend, public libraries  couldn't acquire it, and if you
stopped paying your rental fee, it would  expire and become
unreadable!

What the marketroids predicted didn't come true. The
anti-book has been an  abject failure. What seems to be
succeeding instead is the copylefted  book. My own online
catalog, The Assayer,[3] currently lists 385 books  that are
free as in beer (i.e., can be read without paying money),
of  which 50 are free as in speech (come with copyleft
licenses, and are  guaranteed to stay free forever). My list
is based only on random  websurfing done by me and other
users of my web site, so the true number  of free books is
certainly much greater than this. What's perhaps more 
significant than the quantity of books on the list is their
quality: at  least two of them[4],[5] seem to be the
standard textbooks in their field  today.

Displacing Unfree Books

So at least in some cases, free books have displaced unfree
ones in the  marketplace. This is a remarkable achievement!
For all the open-source  software movement's successes, I'm
not aware of any case in which an  entrenched proprietary
program was pushed out of first place in the market  by
open-source software. We should sit up and pay attention to
what this  tells us about the future of the free information
movement. How did it  happen, and why has it happened with
books but not with software?

One difference between books and software is that unlike
books, software  is easy to emulate and easy to add features
to. An innovation like the  graphical user unterface can be
embraced and extended by proprietary  software companies
like Apple and Microsoft, and the winner in the  marketplace
will be whoever has the best marketing. Conversely, an 
open-source project like OpenOffice.org can try to compete
with an  entrenched proprietary program like MS Office, but
will always have to  play catch-up when Microsoft adds a new
feature that one user out of a  thousand comes to consider
indispensible. None of this happens with books.  Microsoft
can't just say, "Romeo and Juliet was a big success for 
Shakespeare, so we'll write something similar."

Books also have no barrier to entry. Most people think
computers are scary  and confusing. They're willing to keep
paying for new versions of Word  because they don't want to
have to learn a different word processor, and  they're
worried about compatibility. Books, however, are easy to
use, and  most computer users know how to use an electronic
book that is in the  ubiquitous (and nonproprietary) Adobe
Acrobat format. Dead Trees

Readers want their books on paper, and this is another
advantage that  authors of free books enjoy and open-source
programmers don't. A printed  book is something you can
sell. An open-source software vendor like  Mandrake can have
a tough time convincing users to pay for something they 
could get for free. Book publishers like Baen and O'Reilly,
however, have  found that they can increase sales of their
printed books by giving away  the digital versions for free.
This has also been my own experience with  my self-published
physics textbooks. It's cheap marketing: readers can  browse
the digital book to see if it's something they want, and if
they  like it, they're willing to pay for the convenience of
a printed copy.

By the way, here's another place where the dot-bombers
goofed. Remember a  few years ago when they were predicting
that print-on-demand publishing  would be the wave of the
future? You were supposed to be able to go to  your local
Borders or Barnes and Noble, ask for an obscure book on 
medieval Bulgaria, and have it printed and bound while you
sipped a $5  cappucino. It didn't happen, probably in part
because the technology was  unwieldy and in part because the
store's employees would have had to show  an unusual level
of craftsmanship and attention to detail considering  their
pay and their already busy workloads. The Cathedral, Not the
Bazaar

Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar[6] has had a big
effect on how  hackers think about open-source software.
(And by the way, this is another  example of a book that is
free in digital form, and can also be bought in  print.)
Raymond described a model of collaborative software
development in  which a large, geographically dispersed
group of programmers worked  together in a seemingly chaotic
way. This bazaar model was to be  contrasted with the
cathedral model, in which everything is done according  to a
detailed, preexisting plan.

The bazaar model seems to have been almost a complete
failure in the world  of free books, although not for want
of trying. Tellingly, The Cathedral  and the Bazaar was
itself written cathedral-style by Raymond. He has also 
started a bazaar-style book project, The Art of Unix
Programming[7], which  appears to be languishing. I can only
think of one high-quality  bazaar-model free book, a
textbook in which each author wrote one  chapter.[4]

The failure of the bazaar model with free books might not
seem surprising,  since to most people it sounds like the
silly party game where each person  takes a turn adding more
onto a story. We normally assume that an author  has a
unique voice, and that authorship can't be delegated.
However, quite  a high percentage of the world's free books
seem to be software  documentation, which in principle
should be amenable to a decentralized  approach. The GFDL
copyleft license for books is clearly aimed at such 
projects, and requires, for example, that the book be
maintained in a form  that can be edited with free software,
so that it will never become a pig  in a poke if the
original author loses interest or goes incommunicado.  Group
authorship, however, just doesn't seem to have caught on,
even in  software documentation. Maybe the explanation is
that in software  projects, the number of programmers
interested in writing documentation  averages to less than
one. However, that wouldn't explain the failure of  the
Nupedia open-content encyclopedia project, which would seem
to have  been ideally suited for group authorship. My own
experience attempting to  contribute an article to Nupedia
suggests a simpler theory: people make  free information
because it's fun, and group authorship is not fun.

Free Forever, or Just For Now?

Eric Raymond's name is closely associated with the bazaar
model, while  Richard Stallman's evokes the cathedral, as
demonstrated most dramatically  by the contrast between
Stallman's HURD kernel project and the Linux  kernel. There
is another way in which Stallman's unique point of view has 
been prescient when it comes to free books. One of his key
concerns has  been how to make sure that once information
was set free, it would never  be recaptured and made
proprietary again. Apparently this focus came from  his
experience with the Emacs editor --- Stallman wrote the
editor,  incorporating some code that other programmers had
shared with him, and a  dispute later arose in which his
coauthors tried to keep him from  distributing the program
freely. Just as Stallman's cathedral style has  turned out
to be more typical of free books than of free programs, I
think  his horror of backsliding is more apropos for prose
than for code. Free  software predates Stallman's invention
of copyleft, and old no-license  freeware like Donald
Knuth's TeX has shown no particular tendency to  become
unfree (and the Emacs dispute, as far as I can tell, was
simply a  misunderstanding that could have been avoided if
the authors had made an  agreement in writing).

Books are different. Self-publishing a book is much more
difficult than  self-publishing a program, and print
publishing is a capital-intensive  business. Nearly all
authors need to work with a publishing house if they  want
to see their books in print. In most cases, the book
contract gives  the copyright to the publisher. (There are
standard contracts for most  types of books, and authors
generally have a hard time negotiating any  special terms.)
Many authors are not willing to copyleft a book because 
they're afraid it will be a stumbling block if they want to
sell it to a  publisher later. It's very common to find a
free-as-in-beer book available  for downloading, but with a
note on the author's web page that the book is  free ``for
now.'' In other words, the day the author gets a book deal,
the  web page will quietly evaporate, and the book will be
gone from the world  of free information. I've also seen
cases where a book was available in  electronic form from
the publisher's web site, but later the publisher  stopped
making it available for downloading. Addison-Wesley, for
example,  has done this with some of its technical books.
One author's web page[8]  states, Thanks to the adventurous
spirit of our publisher, A K Peters,  Ltd., you can now
download the entire book "A=B" to yourself right now.  [...]
This offer is good until April 1, 2000, at which time it may
be  withdrawn. The book is still available for downloading,
but who knows for  how long.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

We respect books. One reason has always been their potential
permanence,  which makes it especially worrisome that free
books have such a tendency  to vanish or become unfree.
Another reason is economics. In the middle  ages, books were
awesome objects simply because they cost so much to  create
--- a rich man could own five or ten. Even after the
invention of  the printing press, a big initial investment
was needed in order to  publish a book. The assumption was
that if you could get your book  published, it must be good.
Somehow it had risen to the top of what  editors universally
refer to as the ``slush pile.''

The World-Wide Web changed all that. The web brought cheap
publishing to  the masses, so inevitably it cheapened
publishing. Nobody is terribly  impressed when they hear
that I wrote a book and put it on the web ---  what
impresses them is when they hold the bound, printed object
in their  hands. We still need a way to tell good books from
bad ones, but when it  comes to free books, we no longer
have a publisher to make an editorial  decision. Who is the
gatekeeper? We still need intelligent, qualified  people to
help us sift the wheat from the chaff, but when it comes to
free  books, the judgment of quality can come after
publication, not before.  This is a wonderful thing! Top-40
radio is a sample of what you get from  the modern media
conglomerates if you give them centralized control before 
publication. The web can make publishing free --- free as in
freedom. But  with freedom comes responsibility, and that's
why I'll end with a request.  Please take the time to write
a short review of a free book on The  Assayer. If you
haven't read a free book recently, you might be surprised 
at how much good reading you can get for free --- browse The
Assayer and  look for books that have a dandelion flower or
bud next to their titles,  indicating that they're free.

References

[1] Ben Crowell, Do Open-Source Books Work? >>Link
[2] Clifford Lynch, The Battle to Define the Future of the
Book in the  Digital World >>Link
[3] The Assayer >>Link
[4] On-Line Biophysics Textbook >>Link. The book can be
reviewed on The  Assayer>>Link
[5] Warren Siegel, Fields >>Link. The book can be reviewed
on The  Assayer>>Link
[6] Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar >>Link. The
book can be  reviewed on The Assayer>>Link
[7] Eric Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming >>Link. The
book can be  reviewed on The Assayer>>Link
[8] Marko Petkovsek, Herbert Wilf, Doron Zeilberger, A=B
>>Link. The book  can be reviewed on The Assayer>>Link

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