My 3D Printer Engineering book is getting close to complete after about three years of work. It’s 100% written (~150,000 words) and I’m working furiously on illustrations now. Should go to the publisher before the end of the year.
I don’t want to spam the group but a lot of people have expressed interest in progress updates. If you want to be notified about the release or see the table of contents, check the Google Forms signup sheet. (I won’t use your email for anything but book notifications.)
FYI: Releasing no pdf won’t help a bit against piracy. Removing copy protection from ePub and mobi is just one click away.
Maybe a discount for students could be more effective.
@ChPech Anything will get pirated if people want to pirate it bad enough. Doesn’t mean I need to make it easier I was already thinking about permissive licensing for classroom use, but need to discuss it with my publisher.
It’s not making it easier for the one who downloads an unlicensed copy, just for the uploader, and you only need one of the latter.
Even worse if the pirated version provides pdf and the regular doesn’t.
If I design stuff I do it on the PC so any technical documentation needs to be PC compatible. It’s just much more efficient if stuff is searchable, annotatable and copy&pasteable.
Another possibility might be individually watermarking the pdf as a soft DRM. But that depends on the publisher too.
@ChPech Yeah, individual watermarks is kind of what I was thinking, but that sounds like a lot of work unless it can be automated somehow. (I have no idea.)
I don’t like DRM and assume pirating will happen to some degree regardless, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to make life difficult for paying customers. For example, I’d love to give a searchable PDF copy to people who buy the dead tree book, or license people who buy the e-book to print themselves a spiral-bound copy at Kinko’s or something. Ultimately it’s not my decision to make, but my publisher understands the community so I think we’ll come up with something good.
I was already thinking about permissive licensing for classroom use, but need to discuss it with my publisher.