From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2002-08-12T10:11:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Economics of E-books? ( was re: Dr. Dobbs Ruby Article)

"Gavin Sinclair" <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au> writes:

> Andy & Dave lost at least one sale (to me) by giving the book away,
> because there are other Ruby books to buy, so it seems sensible to
> have (access to) two books for the same price as one.

The reality is that no technical book author writes with the
expectation of making real money on the project. Some books become big
sellers, but for the average, in terms of return on hours invested,
book writing is about equivalent to flipping burgers. So why do it? I
suspect there are as many reasons as there are authors, but in the
case of Programming Ruby, we did it because we wanted to share with
others this great language we'd discovered (and as groundwork for
another book which we haven't got around to starting yet, but that's
another story).

Because of this, releasing the book under an open license just made
good sense: we hoped it would help spread the word more. Having a free
version out there clearly impacts sales: the graph of Amazon ranking
before and after we released it is pretty conclusive. But we're not
really driven by sales, and so I'm personally just happy that people
are downloading it and enjoying the language it describes. It is
incredibly rewarding to see more and more people using Ruby, and to
see Ruby mentioned more and more in mainstream articles, and to know
that the PickAxe helped catalyze that.



Cheers


Dave