About Apress refusing to make the eBook free, I think you're too hard on them: What really flipped my lid, though, was seeing other Apress books like Dive Into

About Apress refusing to make the eBook free, I think you're too hard on them: What really flipped my lid, though, was seeing other Apress books like Dive Into Python and Pro Git getting the treatment I wanted. You can read both of these awesome titles online, in full, for free. Offering electronic content for free to promote print book sales isn’t an alien concept to Apress so someone’s playing favorites over there. More likely, the idea sounds crazy and/or scary to them, but they decided to try it out with a few of their books to see how well it works. You're in the control group. Maybe that's the result of "playing favorites," but a less whiny way to put it would be that other authors had more influence or did a better job of advocacy. Or you were just unlucky. But you can take comfort in the possibility that your campaign to make the Beginning Ruby PDF free helped convince Apress to make some of their other PDFs free.