Recently Lance, at the request of Vijay Vazirani, tweeted the following (I paraphrase)
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Online and Matching-based Market Design book now available as free PDF
The password is OMBMD_CUP
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This tweet raises two questions.
1) When a book is put online, does it cut into sales? I've heard that people still like paper so the posting on line might be like an ad for the book. Also, for academic books, the authors WANT it to be out there and don't care so much about sales. If Gasarch & Martin's Bounded Queries in Recursion Theory was available for illegal download I would be delighted. And surprised.
2) SO, they post it to make it more available and generate buzz. So why have a password? Was this a compromise:
a) We want people to BUY the book so we'll post it with a password and limit access.
b) We want people to SEE the book since as academics we don't care about sales, and it might generate buzz, so we don't want a password
c) COMPROMISE: Have a password but tell everyone what it is.
If you can think of a more plausible scenario, leave a comment.
I have a couple of undergrad textbooks that I give away online. I also sell one as printed paperback (for about $28). For many years the paper copies sold well. But Orthogonal Publishing helps me with this stuff and he tells me that since the pandemic, paper sales are way off, both for my book and for the other books that he works with. He wonders if perhaps students got used to online texts?
ReplyDeleteAs to the password, over the years I've used a number of setups to give the book away (it is pretty foolish for me to pay for the bandwidth to give it away, so I try to work through others). Some just have a password, that's just the way they are engineered. The folks I currently use do it that way.
If I had my book on my website and someone downloads it does that actually cost me something? Perhaps it costs my school something?
DeleteMost hosting plans these days are "unlimited". The hosting company I use currently charges $48 a year for a basic plan. They advertise it as 10 GB storage and unlimited bandwith. However, there probably really is a limit to the bandwith, but you'll only hit it if a search engine or something starts making crazy requests to your site. A while back, I hit the "unlimited" limit when a partner site starting making too many requests due to a search engined making too many requests to it.
DeleteYes, a PDF of a text is a reasonably large file, on the order of 10M. If you get thousands of downloads each week then that is noticeable traffic. If your school provides the bandwidth then that's great. Commercial providers I looked into will tolerate a certain amount of traffic but there are limits before they start charging more.
DeleteI have a fairly inexpensive plan. The limit is 100 GB a month. The matching book is about 22 MB.
DeleteUpload it to a public cloud storage like Amazon's or Google's.
DeleteYou can limit the bandwidth, and the cost of storage itself is really pennies.
But even better option would be to make available for free on Kindle or Google Books.
YouTube model for Books is something worth exploring where authors can earn money based on how much people interact with their books.
It is in fact very easy to download Gasarch and Martin's Bounded Queries in Recursion Theory! Libgen is an excellent resource
ReplyDeleteGreat! I have not sold many copies lately (0 in the last 5 years) though I doubt its availability online is the reason.
ReplyDeleteHaving a password you give out means people are more likely to have to come to your webpage to download the book. It is less easy to just share the pdf.
ReplyDeleteWhy is making it less easy to share a good thing? That is my quandry: if you make it public I would think you WANT people to access it.
DeleteI don't know if more plausible, but different passwords could be used for different sources, to test which platform is more effective when posting about the book.
ReplyDelete(d) it's a form of "Token Gesture of Control" which has limited strategic impact, but still serves at least two generic purposes.
ReplyDelete1. symbolic adherence to norms. symbolic gesture. authors or publishers might want to signal that they are adhering to certain norms, even if password's impact is minimal.
2. social sharing and engagement (@Bill's post is evidently falling into this category.) Spark conversation, interaction ...contributing to book's visibility, interest, buzz and general engagement.
(1) Token gesture: YES. Reminds me of when dictatorships hold elections where the dictator wins 99% of the vote. I always wonder who they think they are fooling. Same here- who is the audience for token gesture.
Delete(2) YES, if they didn't have the password then the book might have gotten just one tweet. Now it gets a tweet AND a blog entry!. But the blog entry is not really about the book. Even so....
Be happy, your book IS available for illegal download:
ReplyDeletehttp://libgen.is/search.php?req=Bounded+Queries+in+Recursion+Theory+&lg_topic=libgen&open=0&view=simple&res=25&phrase=1&column=title
I am ecstatic!
DeleteI am sure most people would be able to "crack" that password in a couple of tries -- so there was no point keeping it secret :-)
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, people typically have time during the summer to examine a new book for possible courses in the future, so kudos to CUP for making it widely available; the hard copy is still a couple of months away. That was also the reason for my request to Lance.
The only other info in the hard copy will be the cover, which is also widely available, e.g., my home page.
Without reading the rest of the comments, why not a password just because that is the only way to access the document on the website where it is posted (and the same would be of any other document or reason to access the website where it is posted).
ReplyDeleteMy point was- why bother with a password for a document you WANT people to see.
ReplyDelete