if you give away a complete book that contains excellent examples and code, there is no economic return.

That last statement is based on a lot of assumptions. … The assumption is based on the idea that some, most or all of the people would have paid for the book in the first place.

No, it’s a tautology: if you give something away… there is no economic return.

25, less explicitly than implicitly, but para 2 of his comment at 9. though I never intended to use the term Lost money to mean net loss, more a loss of potential earnings.

Presumably pirates see some value in the product or they wouldn’t pirate it. Richard isn’t seeing any of this value. Therefore he has ‘lost’ potential earnings.

Um, I won’t, sorry. I’ll say there’s no substitute for the growing movement of open source coding through collaboration and community development that means not only can you usually find an answer to your problem online; but if you can’t there is usually a more than helpful community happy to help you for free simple for the benefit of the profession.

29. The assumption is based on the idea that some, most or all of the people would have paid for the book in the first place.

I thought that there was one core assumption: that if the same content is available electronically for free or as a book for money, sales of the book will be lower.

I would wish to rephrase my final sentence, however. “But if you give away a complete book that contains excellent examples and code, there is no economic return *from book sales*.” Quite a few technologists have made money by using free software and information as a loss leader for their consultancy work or public speaking. Dave Winder and Mark Russinovich immediately come to mind. I can also think of many others who have not followed the loss leader route.

The reason is similar to that why many music artists resent piracy. If you are a stage performer who can maintain high ticket prices, piracy helps to spread your work and thus generates income. For the majority of artists, however, live performance is the loss leader that promotes record sales.

In technology, Red Hat Linux is an interesting example. Red Hat was one of the first popular Linux distros and was essentially free of charge unless you required support. A lot of commercial software developers certified their work to run on Red Hat and a few others, which boosted the popularity of those distros. But Red Hat still didn’t make enough money until it turned itself into a commercial distro. They created a free Red Hat alternative, Fedora, but if you want the fully supported Red Hat and the support for third party applications, you have to pay.

The trouble is, by voting for the Pirate Party you are not sending a message against the DEB, you are encouraging people to believe that they need the DEB because the alternative is not a fair political compromise but an extreme.

“The best technology books sell”

Is all that needs to be said. Any Software/IT professional will tell you that there’s just no substitute for having a proper book on your desk that you can refer to. It’s laughable that you’d try to explain poor sales of a shit book by waving your hands and shouting “Those bloody pirates!”.

Exactly, it’s all well and good someone like you standing up and saying you HAVE lost money,

Where did Richard claim he lost money? What he’s saying is that others have benefited from his work without giving him anything in return.

Exactly, it’s all well and good someone like you standing up and saying you HAVE lost money, but you can’t prove that you have as infringement isn’t theft. I’m just asking for honesty.

“Giving content away does not work unless it is used to drive some other business. The “honesty box” approach shows that there are lots of dishonest freeloaders out there.”

Assuming that everyone that visited got what they expected from your work, but yes I tend to agree the honesty box approach is a rather wishful concept. But then I tend to think, and sorry if this offends, technology people trying to profit off of their knowledge are trying to run against the tides of expectations anyway. Given the number of people happy to give their source code away for free because it’s the right thing to do to further innovation and development, you’re in the functional minority in trying to profit from it.

You know that such stats are impossible to compile, so we will have to cling to our own conjectures, right?

As Charlieman says, a lot of work went into the book with a lot of source code and detailed descriptions. The first book I wrote was because I was active in the programming usenet groups providing help, and I continued to support my books that way – free help and usually the help I gave was not even connected with the book.

But just to give you the opposite side, for one project, the publishing contract fell through, so I completed it and put the entire thing online (about 60,000 words) with a paypal button and adsense. Over 4 years I have earned about $400 from that, yet there have been something like 100,000 page views. $400 for a piece of work that took me 6 months to write.

Giving content away does not work unless it is used to drive some other business. The “honesty box” approach shows that there are lots of dishonest freeloaders out there.

@Aaron:
The sapient swing voter needs first of all to find out if the seat is “safe”. If it is, all votes apart from those for the incumbent are “wasted” in the sense that they do not get any representation in Parliament. There’s FPTP for you. It has to go. http://bit.ly/aFAVcj

In a safe seat, then you are spot on, you might as well vote for your principles.The best signal to send is with a Green Party vote, because it not only covers the Pirate Party issue, but also signals your wish for radical reform of our political and economic system. In other words, you get more bangs for your ballot than voting Pirate, despite their romantic and Depp-like attractions.

If on the other hand you are in a marginal seat, then while I as a Green would still wish for you to vote Green, since that will lever the winner to be more green in Parliament so as to win your vote back. But I recognise that tactical voting is very appealing in a marginal seat, and here surely any thinking voter will wish to vote ABT (Anything But Tory), and if presented with a choice between Labour and LibDem, they will back the LibDem in the hope of getting a well-hung Parliament, with Vince Cable in the Treasury, and Proportional Representation well and truly on the menu.

All voters who care about democracy and political reform are recommended to murmur the words “First Past the Post Has Got To Go” to the clerks as they hand you your precious polling form.

As to whoever suggested voting Green, well, Lib Dems say the same thing: why vote Green when the Lib Dems already have a perfectly good policy on the environment. I don’t know what the Greens’ policy on copyright/disconnection is, but I suspect voting Green doesn’t quite send the same message as voting Pirate Party.

In fact he said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

Busted.

I’ve had the quote a while in one of my notebooks. I should have double-checked.

Let’s call it a paraphrase and I’ll get the drinks in.

The best technology books sell because they contain cracking good examples. (Few books about Windows desktop and server meet that criterion.)

If a publisher and author choose to post sample chapters and sample code online, my attention will be drawn. I’ll give it more attention than to a book with four stars in an Amazon review.

But if you give away a complete book that contains excellent examples and code, there is no economic return.

As Pope said, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

In fact he said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”