The big noise over Open Publishing

[This article was contributed by LWN reader Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier]

There's been a lot of media attention focused on Prentice Hall's plan to publish books published under the Open Publication License branded as the "Bruce Perens Open Source Series." There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but what most of the media is failing to mention is that publishing books under open licenses isn't exactly a revolutionary idea.

Books published under open licenses of one sort or another have been around almost as long as Linux. The Linux Documentation Project was published in a number of forms very early on, including the Linux Bible by Yggdrasil and the Linux Encyclopedia published by WorkGroup Solutions. For a while, that was just about the only printed documentation available for Linux. Other open source titles started to follow in 1999 and 2000 after Linux started to be viewed as a commercial opportunity by publishers.

The list of titles available under open source licenses these days is pretty hefty. This is a list of just a few titles that are relatively current:

• Advanced Linux Programming (New Riders).
• GIMP - The Official Handbook (Coriolis).
• Grokking the GIMP (New Riders).
• GTK+/GNOME Application Development (New Riders).
• KDE 2.0 Development (Sams Publishing).
• Learning with Python (Green Tea Press).
• The Linux Cookbook (No Starch Press).
• Linux Device Drivers (O'Reilly).
• Practical PostgreSQL (O'Reilly).
• Vi IMproved (New Riders).
• Using Samba (O'Reilly).
• The Zope Book (New Riders).

That's hardly a definitive list, there are many more out there. Nearly every publisher that has dabbled in Linux titles has released a few books under open licenses. Some publishers have tried to make a fast buck by compiling open source documentation, others have agreed to publish original works under open licenses. Some titles have sold well, and others not so well but the sales figures are more likely a reflection of the topic or content of the title than the license that the book is published under. In fact, Prentice Hall has published other books under open licenses, but with much less fanfare.

The unique thing about Prentice Hall's approach is that it specifically trying to create a brand centered around books under open licenses. Bruce Perens told us that Prentice Hall decided to brand the books with his name because they "felt that anyone could do an Open Source series, and they needed an additional differentiator. That differentiator is my leadership of the series, they feel I have credibility in this space." He says that he's very happy for the publicity. "I definitely want it. All the publicity that I could get because it definitely helps the Free Software community for people outside the community to see that more stuff is being done in the Free Software paradigm."

Perens says that the book will be published electronically about three months after the print versions hit store shelves. The reason for the lag is to give Prentice Hall time to "saturate the market" with the print version, to reduce the incentive for other publishers to republish the same content in print form.

Right now, Prentice Hall has three books available and several more in the works. Perens says that the company is not putting an upper limit on the number of titles that they will publish in this series. Authors writing for the series will be getting the same kind of publishing agreements from Prentice Hall, including comparable advances and royalties. Perens has received about twenty or thirty proposals since the series was announced, and he says he's game for more.

He also noted that the company does not intend to invoke any of the non-free optional clauses of the OPL, and that they may very well publish titles under other free licenses like the GNU Free Documentation License.

With any luck, if Prentice Hall is seen to be successful, other publishers will follow suit and commit more resources to publishing titles under free licenses. There are a number of advantages to having documentation freely available, aside from being able to get the title for free. Computer publishers are notorious for letting titles go out of print if the sales aren't up to par, making many good technology titles unavailable for all intents and purposes. Publication under a free license also opens the door for translations of titles that might not otherwise be produced, and updated versions when the author and/or publisher has lost interest in a title.

Free software benefits greatly from free documentation. This move by Prentice Hall is a welcome development in that it should produce more free documentation for our community. The community must keep in mind, however, that this sort of experiment will be short-lived if the market for books collapses. If we want free (as in speech) documentation, we need to put our money where our eyeballs are.

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