From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2006-05-16T21:15:36+09:00 Subject: Re: Ticked Off On 5/16/06, Jeff Rose wrote: > Austin Ziegler wrote: >> Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to >> what goes on on the #ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much, >> but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off. >> >> [0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get >> on emule and search for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs >> floating around if you know where to look >> >> I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off >> that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I >> was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's >> announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. >> These people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community. >> >> They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even >> temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason. > Agreed, we should support the PragProg guys so they can continue to do > the great stuff they have been doing. David Black's book ("Ruby for Rails") is not published by the PragProgs. > [...] As an undergraduate, or what you might call "a pissant" student, Pissant thief, not student. There is a difference. > I read a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer that I BORROWED from a > professor, and I seriously believe it changed the way I approach life. > [...] That same dirty, bent-up copy was passed around between many of > my friends, and we all regard it as classic. [...] Oh, but maybe I > should never have looked at that copy my OS professor lent me. It was > evil and wrong to not pay the authors for their hard work, wasn't it? > What if he had just sent me the PDF to read instead? Would that have > produced a substantially different outcome? Borrowing a physical book makes it unavailable to others. This is the basis of libraries (and libraries are going to have to find a new model as more and more books are published electronically). You knew that the book belonged to the professor. If there had been a PDF of it (and there isn't a legal one as far as I know), the professor would have been able to give you a copy with no inconvenience to himself and you would have had no incentive to delete the copy of the book when you were done reading it, and every incentive -- and example! -- of passing along that PDF to other friends, each of whom would then have their own copy of the book. > Life is not that black and white, and downloading a PDF to peruse, or > to read in its entirety, is barely different from checking out a book > from the library or borrowing from a friend. No, you're wrong. With the borrowed book, you must return it. With the illegally copied PDF, there's no incentive for you to delete it -- or even do the right thing and *buy* the book. Consider Baen's successful experiment of Webscriptions. There are books that I have read from the free site and not turned around and bought anything further from that author, or have not bought the paperback or hardcover books. There are others, though, that I have done exactly that (David Weber's books, certainly). > I think taking a hard line attitude like this is not only useless, > because we will never digress back to "the way it used to be," but it > is also counter productive. The way you succeed as an author or > publisher is not by punishing your future clientele, but by trying to > win them over as passionate fans. If you can get people engrossed they > will end up buying much more than one book, and in the long run that > is how you make a living. This statement has *nothing* to do with the complaint. The reality is that this is the way that *all* publishers have *always* had to succeed ... except maybe textbook publishers. ;) But this is David Black's first book, and one of Manning's first PDF releases. Do we *really* want to discourage Manning from embracing a new model of publishing which encourages unencumbered PDF releases? Not me. [...] This *is* black and white. The asshat who was speaking on IRC was advocating theft. Temporary or no, it's still theft. I don't care if the copying costs are nil: the price of the PDF is cheaper than the book itself. [...] > In the end, building a larger community of rubyists, who will almost > all buy books eventually, is the most important factor for the > survival of the authors, like your friend David, that we would like to > support. If a few people are first introduced to this world through > ultra-illegal, black market copies of PDF versions, big deal. My > guess is if they dig it they'll buy the next copy so they can read it > in bed. Except that ... the conversion rate for that is minimal. Don't get me wrong, I believe that the unencumbered PDF model is the right direction, and that the pricing on them is good. But there are sample chapters for perusing for a reason, and now that the book is in stores, you can peruse it at the store if you want to see more than the sample chapter. What I know is that the actions here strongly discourage publishers and authors from writing and publishing books in other than traditional formats. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca