This is great. I've been anticipating this book for a while. I'm tired of hearing the same canned complaints about perl. It's a great language. Thanks for showing us all why. :)
> It's a great language. Thanks for showing us all why.
Which part of the book made you think that? I'm actually curious, since after a quick browse through, I see a tutorial / well written language reference mostly...
One question, I noticed that the pdf from from the onyxneon site is 185 pages long, when a previous draft which i downloaded from chromatic's site was 273 pages long.
I have an essay in progress about this model. My central thesis is that the most correct pricing model (in terms of ethics and economics) is one which compensates the author's time to create a work.
If I can write two books in a year and a reasonable wage for my experience and expenses is $80,000 a year, each book needs to earn about $40,000 to justify me continuing to write. Divide that by the number of readers to figure out the amount of profit I need to make per unit.
I can justify giving away the electronic version and soliciting donations on theory that free redistribution from countless readers will reach a much larger potential audience for print sales and donations than I could possibly reach, especially with my marketing budget. Besides that, doing so appeals to my sense of ethics. Many, many people contributed to making Perl 5 and many, many people helped me write the book.
Since most tech books sell way less than 10,000 copies, I imagine this kind of thing will become more and more common. I believe Mark Pilgrim has frequently credited giving his books away for free online with increasing his physical sales.
A private conversation with a tech author a few years ago suggested otherwise.
Sorry I don't feel free to give details, but basically his book book was for sale, then he made it available for free as HTML, and he claimed the drop in sales on Amazon the next day was quite distinctive. All subsequent versions were only available for a price, e-book or otherwise.
Still, looking at the anecdotal evidence, I think that some books, books that work best as references, will loose sales if there's a free online version since reading it online works so well; it may be better than any other version. If a book is more complex, requires more close reading, a physical copy (or at least a better formated PDF) would be preferable to some free HTML version.
I've bought physical books when a free ebook was available, for the convenience of having a good reading experience away from the computer.
However, that was before iPad. As ebook reading experiences away from the computer get better and better, there will be fewer cases where I'll by the physical book if a free ebook is available.
