14 ms·

Get Your Book, Make It Free

356 points by arunc 7y ago

LeonB 7y ago
This is a good step in making your work live a longer life, and do more to help the world. Particularly once that first (and likely only) flush of money has come and gone.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
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.
- James_Owens_69 7y ago
  Ereaders are dying and Amazon killed them with their dumping prices. PDF works on everything except crippled and slow ebook readers.
- teekert 7y ago
  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 :)
  - ghaff 7y ago
    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.
    - icxa 7y ago
      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.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        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.
  - ZebZ 7y ago
    Amazon will convert formats for you so that it works on your Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email
  - vram22 7y ago
    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.
    - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      PDF is a lossy format, slightly better than an image, it can be really hard to extract legible data from it.
      - vram22 7y ago
        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.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >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.
- memling 7y ago
  > 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.
- umvi 7y ago
  I write my books in markdown and use pandoc to generate PDF and EPUB.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    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.
    - umvi 7y ago
      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.
    - homarp 7y ago
      for those who might wonder, like me: https://github.com/joeyespo/grip 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.
      - alias_neo 7y ago
        Thanks, I should have linked grip!
    - trnglina 7y ago
      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.
- ultrafilter 7y ago
  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.
  - contravariant 7y ago
    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).
  - AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
    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.
    - Tyr42 7y ago
      I did it once. Set the page size to match my kindle and recompiled. It turns out there's a fair amount of tuning to make math expressions not run off the edge of the page.
- decebalus1 7y ago
  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.
  - AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
    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.
- ivan_ah 7y ago
  If the book contains lots of equations, ePub is not the best. The best thing I've found is https://github.com/softcover/softcover 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.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  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.)
  - Ngunyan 7y ago
    > which while EPUB can handle in theory, ...... when converting to PDF, etc. So are you referring to problems when converting epubs to pdf and not problems when using epubs?
- la_barba 7y ago
  Can an author typeset their work using the EPUB format?
  - mkl 7y ago
    EPUB is an open standard, and many (often free) tools can target it, so yes.
- pfranz 7y ago
  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.
- OJFord 7y ago
  > Will there be an EPUB version? > 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. http://haskellbook.com/faq.html http://haskellbook.com/faq.html
- Ngunyan 7y ago
  I prefer epubs because it it endlessly customizable and modifiable. If I am unhappy with the styling of an epub I have, I just dive in and change it. It's nothing but html and css underneath. Don't like the image? Replace it. When reading, I like adding my thoughts on the margins of a paper book. Want to add some annotation in an epub but has to look different than the original content? Easily done. I just create a copy of the epub, set-aside the original, and change the copy. I never wanted to convert from epub to pdf since that would freeze the book's contents. I always find myself converting from pdf to epub.
- lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  Please, no. A million times: No. 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.
- miki123211 7y ago
  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.
- barbs 7y ago
  Why not both?
fjsolwmv 7y ago
Why do publishers agree to rights reversion? It reduces heir opportunity to directly profit and it increases competition for their other books they sell.
- Veen 7y ago
  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.
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  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.
- dmwallin 7y ago
  I imagine there are probably some tax benefits if they can write it off.
Veen 7y ago
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.
- Angostura 7y ago
  Hmmm? pop a ePub into iBooks on your iPad and you change font, size etc to your hearts content and it will reflow nicely. Not so with a PDF
  - ghaff 7y ago
    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.
  - Veen 7y ago
    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.
    - mrob 7y ago
      >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.
      - Veen 7y ago
        > 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.
throwayEngineer 7y ago
I changed my book from 10$ to free. After 300 sales I decided it was better to let hundreds of thousands learn how to save money, than 300. My only regret is there is no positive feedback. With a sale, I get an email and paid. With a book view, I barely get analytics. I suppose my request as an author, give feedback. At least let me know what you like or didn't like.
- martin_a 7y ago
  Have you thought about asking for a symbolic price like $1?
  - falcor84 7y ago
    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.
    - antepodius 7y ago
      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.
      - martin_a 7y ago
        On a second thought, this is what happens to me, too. Before I pay a $1 and have to log in to PayPal or whatever, I will rather not pay anything, although I value the content. Interesting effect.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    $1 is cheap. Free is author offering knowledge for free.
60654 7y ago
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.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
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?) Edit: mostly I don't need to or it's obvious https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-do-i-put-on-my-copyright-page-when-self-publishing https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-do-i-... This article it seems is mostly where you assigned away your rights to a company if it falls out of publication.
- asplake 7y ago
  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).
FarhadG 7y ago
- (React) Have sold thousands and now offered for free: https://leanpub.com/ui-react https://leanpub.com/ui-react - (Real-Time Rendering with WebGL2) Just reached out to the publisher. Let's see what happens: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-applications-ebook/dp/B07GVNQLH5/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541780051&sr=8-1&keywords=webgl+2#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-...
skookumchuck 7y ago
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.
- ghaff 7y ago
  >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.)
  - pfranz 7y ago
    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.
    - sitkack 7y ago
      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.
chadash 7y ago
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.
otakucode 7y ago
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.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I wish more authors would do this. I too prefer EPUB but I recognize there is lower friction to just publish it as a PDF.
xrd 7y ago
O'Reilly let me put my book up. Thanks O'Reilly for being a cool publisher! https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/ https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/
kvartz 7y ago
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)
harshreality 7y ago
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?
- maire 7y ago
  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.
- notatoad 7y ago
  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.

356 points by arunc 7y ago

This is a good step in making your work live a longer life, and do more to help the world. Particularly once that first (and likely only) flush of money has come and gone.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

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.

James_Owens_69 7y ago
Ereaders are dying and Amazon killed them with their dumping prices. PDF works on everything except crippled and slow ebook readers.
teekert 7y ago
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 :)
- ghaff 7y ago
  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.
  - icxa 7y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      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.
- ZebZ 7y ago
  Amazon will convert formats for you so that it works on your Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email
- vram22 7y ago
  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.
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    PDF is a lossy format, slightly better than an image, it can be really hard to extract legible data from it.
    - vram22 7y ago
      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.
coldtea 7y ago
>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.
memling 7y ago
> 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.
umvi 7y ago
I write my books in markdown and use pandoc to generate PDF and EPUB.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  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.
  - umvi 7y ago
    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.
  - homarp 7y ago
    for those who might wonder, like me: https://github.com/joeyespo/grip 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.
    - alias_neo 7y ago
      Thanks, I should have linked grip!
  - trnglina 7y ago
    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.
ultrafilter 7y ago
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.
- contravariant 7y ago
  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).
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  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.
  - Tyr42 7y ago
    I did it once. Set the page size to match my kindle and recompiled. It turns out there's a fair amount of tuning to make math expressions not run off the edge of the page.
decebalus1 7y ago
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.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  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.
ivan_ah 7y ago
If the book contains lots of equations, ePub is not the best. The best thing I've found is https://github.com/softcover/softcover 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.
crazygringo 7y ago
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.)
- Ngunyan 7y ago
  > which while EPUB can handle in theory, ...... when converting to PDF, etc. So are you referring to problems when converting epubs to pdf and not problems when using epubs?
la_barba 7y ago
Can an author typeset their work using the EPUB format?
- mkl 7y ago
  EPUB is an open standard, and many (often free) tools can target it, so yes.
pfranz 7y ago
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.
OJFord 7y ago
> Will there be an EPUB version? > 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. http://haskellbook.com/faq.html http://haskellbook.com/faq.html
Ngunyan 7y ago
I prefer epubs because it it endlessly customizable and modifiable. If I am unhappy with the styling of an epub I have, I just dive in and change it. It's nothing but html and css underneath. Don't like the image? Replace it. When reading, I like adding my thoughts on the margins of a paper book. Want to add some annotation in an epub but has to look different than the original content? Easily done. I just create a copy of the epub, set-aside the original, and change the copy. I never wanted to convert from epub to pdf since that would freeze the book's contents. I always find myself converting from pdf to epub.
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
Please, no. A million times: No. 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.
miki123211 7y ago
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.
barbs 7y ago
Why not both?

fjsolwmv 7y ago

Why do publishers agree to rights reversion? It reduces heir opportunity to directly profit and it increases competition for their other books they sell.

Veen 7y ago
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.
Matticus_Rex 7y ago
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.
dmwallin 7y ago
I imagine there are probably some tax benefits if they can write it off.

Veen 7y ago

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.

Angostura 7y ago
Hmmm? pop a ePub into iBooks on your iPad and you change font, size etc to your hearts content and it will reflow nicely. Not so with a PDF
- ghaff 7y ago
  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.
- Veen 7y ago
  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.
  - mrob 7y ago
    >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.
    - Veen 7y ago
      > 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.

throwayEngineer 7y ago

I changed my book from 10$ to free. After 300 sales I decided it was better to let hundreds of thousands learn how to save money, than 300. My only regret is there is no positive feedback. With a sale, I get an email and paid. With a book view, I barely get analytics. I suppose my request as an author, give feedback. At least let me know what you like or didn't like.

martin_a 7y ago
Have you thought about asking for a symbolic price like $1?
- falcor84 7y ago
  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.
  - antepodius 7y ago
    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.
    - martin_a 7y ago
      On a second thought, this is what happens to me, too. Before I pay a $1 and have to log in to PayPal or whatever, I will rather not pay anything, although I value the content. Interesting effect.
- OJFord 7y ago
  $1 is cheap. Free is author offering knowledge for free.

60654 7y ago

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.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

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?) Edit: mostly I don't need to or it's obvious https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-do-i-put-on-my-copyright-page-when-self-publishing https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/18180/what-do-i-... This article it seems is mostly where you assigned away your rights to a company if it falls out of publication.

asplake 7y ago
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).

FarhadG 7y ago

- (React) Have sold thousands and now offered for free: https://leanpub.com/ui-react https://leanpub.com/ui-react - (Real-Time Rendering with WebGL2) Just reached out to the publisher. Let's see what happens: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-applications-ebook/dp/B07GVNQLH5/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541780051&sr=8-1&keywords=webgl+2#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Graphics-WebGL-interactive-...

skookumchuck 7y ago

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.

ghaff 7y ago
>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.)
- pfranz 7y ago
  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.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    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.

chadash 7y ago

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.

otakucode 7y ago

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.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I wish more authors would do this. I too prefer EPUB but I recognize there is lower friction to just publish it as a PDF.

xrd 7y ago

O'Reilly let me put my book up. Thanks O'Reilly for being a cool publisher! https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/ https://buildingtoolswithgithub.teddyhyde.io/

kvartz 7y ago

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)

harshreality 7y ago

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?

maire 7y ago
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.
notatoad 7y ago
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.