Publishers, please, please allow us to buy electronic versions of your books. Just make it reasonably cheap ($5-10 instead of the full $50?) and in multiple formats (PDF and HTML are my favorites), and I will gladly buy them. I have a lot of trouble paying $50 just for a paper version of a book. Is there a chance this could be profitable?
The thing I love most about free books is not that they are free, but that they are generally available in electronic formats that I can then use on my many devices. I can read them on my laptop without having to carry around twice the weight, have them for reference on my desktops without having tons of shelf space and copies for work and home, and have them on my iPod Touch for reading in bed or on the train.
It's particularly an issue with large technical books, as they tend to be big and heavy and won't fit in my bike bag the way an iPod does.
This should be available as an electronic book from Apress, too - all formatted and pretty and whatnot. When the book is shipping, you'll be able to get a professional digital version if you wish. Of course, if you want to take this markdown and make a PDF of it, do feel free.
Because the majority of the percentage of the price goes to the publisher, not the author. Since the publisher is incurring less cost for producing an electronic copy, they should charge less.
The paper is cheap. With print-on-demand, there is no worry about printing too many copies, or storing them.
Paying the editor, someone to typeset the book, someone to redraw the diagrams, technical reviewers, and so on gets expensive, though. I think authors should get more money (as an author), but the publishers do theoretically add value.
(Without the publisher, your book is just the man page or a blog post. And despite the time required for the author to prepare those materials, people are entirely unwilling to pay for them.)
Friends of Ed offers one of their web development books on their website each Thursday as a $10 eBook. Apress also has a daily $10 offer, but Apress's are often outdated or about non-web technologies.
I adore free books. One of the things that pushed me more towards the Python universe, instead of the Ruby universe, was that the quality of the free literature available for the language, and it's major web framework Django. (I know there are other great frameworks for both sides!)
This will be a great way to (finally) learn more about Git.
This is a great contribution to the hacker community. I've been using git for about 1 1/2 years, but I can't wait to read this book and learn more.
If you go to the github URL, this is also a great way to see how one can use a markup language like Markdown to write an entire book in the text editor of your choice, e.g. Vim.
Someone from reddit converted the book to PDF and made it available here:
Its output is mostly fine, but there are a couple of very long lines in verbatim environments that go off the margin. I'm working on a fix for this, but it's not too serious a problem really.
I learned both CVS and SVN from their canonical, free books. (I barely remember their names. They're "the CVS book" and "the SVN book", and you all know how to find them. ;)
So it's no surprise that folks are now trying to create canonical, free books for the next generation of VC as well.
I will start forwarding this to people I know at once.
My book Beginning Ruby has sold about 10,000 copies with only a few hundred in e-book format, and despite pleading (and even begging) with them to be able to release my second edition in a "free" online format (since the e-book sells so appallingly compared to the print edition) - no go :-( Instead I can release a few chapters each month or something similarly annoying.
So kudos for Apress on this, but with the people bitching about the lack of free Ruby books, it's a shame they couldn't extend the same courtesy to me. Even just free as in beer, not even in speech as with this one..!
The thing I love most about free books is not that they are free, but that they are generally available in electronic formats that I can then use on my many devices. I can read them on my laptop without having to carry around twice the weight, have them for reference on my desktops without having tons of shelf space and copies for work and home, and have them on my iPod Touch for reading in bed or on the train.
It's particularly an issue with large technical books, as they tend to be big and heavy and won't fit in my bike bag the way an iPod does.