Community Practise

Just a quick note to point out the publisher-​​sanctioned free PDF avail­able of The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. It’s a guide to building and running online com­munities and social networks. Bacon is the com­munity manager for the Ubuntu oper­ating system, the dom­in­ance of which compared to other Linux variants is arguably down to the strength of its online community.

The download was actually released in September, but I only found it today. I assume some readers have been sim­il­arly remiss.

I may write a little about its content later, but for the moment, a note on the pub­lishing strategy.

O’Reilly is undoubtedly a little more pro­gressive than most pub­lishers, for whom giving away versions of their prop­er­ties for nothing would seem like madness. It’s also released under a Creative Commons license that allows sharing and remixing of the contents – I could, for example, produce a 20-​​page ‘version’ of the tome and give it away here for free. (I won’t, though – I may have some time on my hands, but I’m not mentally ill).

Why should/​would pub­lishers do this? It’s actually a really shrewd com­mer­cial move. Think about the upsides:

1. People on the Internet love FREE STUFF. They feel warmly to people who give it to them. I like O’Reilly as a business to a greater extent because they’ve done this. I am slightly more likely to buy stuff from it.
2. It gen­er­ates a lot of buzz and positive PR. I’ve blogged about the book, for example. More usefully for O’Reilly, Mashable readers voted it the 2nd most important book on social media. This will lead to increased sales of the dead-​​tree version, or I’ll eat my cat.
3. The book is nearly 400-​​pages long. Nobody in their right mind is going to read some­thing that long on screen. It hurts your eyes. You’re going to have a dip into it, decide if it’s useful to you and then buy it.
4. Not knowing whether a book is good or not is a big barrier to buying them online. In a bookshop, you can have a flick through to see if it’s any good. On Amazon, you’re mainly buying blind, which people don’t like to do. (That’s why Amazon give such prom­in­ence to reader reviews and recom­mend­a­tions, of course – because they’re very well-​​aware of this.) The free version recre­ates the in-​​shop browsing exper­i­ence, restoring consumer confidence.
5. This is not a ref­er­ence book. Were this a manual on writing CSS, for example, the PDF version actually has some con­sid­er­able advant­ages over print versions: because you can search and find the nugget you need using your computer. The Art of Community consists of long chapters with lots of dis­cus­sion – you need to read it properly to benefit from it.
6. Someone, some­where probably will make that 20-​​page remix edition and give it away. That, my friends, is called a promo.

And the downsides?

1. If the book was rubbish, then people would find out and not buy it. Of course, this is actually an up-​​side in disguise. The free version shows O’Reilly’s con­fid­ence in its quality. They are saying that they have nothing to hide.
2. Potential buyers might discover it’s not for them. This probably some­times happens. Again, it shows the publisher’s con­fid­ence in the title  — if you pick it up, then it probably is for you. It also gives O’Reilly some moral kudos – it doesn’t want to dupe people into buying some­thing that isn’t going to be useful to them.
3. People might pirate the book. This is some­thing that’s happened since the middle ages, of course. You may recall, for example, the dif­fi­culty of deciding what Shakespeare actually wrote because of the multiple variants of the texts from school. I could take the PDF, repub­lish it on Blurb and sell it myself. But that’s not really going to happen: O’Reilly would sue me and I’d go to jail. Some people might take the risk, but they are idiots.
4. People might print out the book on their office printer, bind it and thus avoid paying for the real deal. Again, this isn’t really going to happen — think about the time, the cost of con­sum­ables and con­sid­er­able chance of getting fired when your boss finds out versus the £18 cover price for the real thing.

So there aren’t really any plaus­ible dis­ad­vant­ages. Unless you’re in the business of selling bad books, in which case you should probably give the whole social-​​networky-​​sharing thing a miss, if you can.

Note that I am not remotely sug­gesting that the free PDF version is a cynical ploy – far from it – but it is cer­tainly shrewd. O’Reilly is not waving goodbye to its prof­it­ab­ility. What it is giving away is both valuable, but not remotely as valuable as the physical book — it’s a con­sid­er­able driver for sales of the dead tree edition.

Seth Godin’s been talking about this stuff for years, I know, but there are still few pub­lishers willing to exper­i­ment. Paul Carr’s recent decision to pirate his own book despite the wishes of his pub­lishers is a great illus­tra­tion of the on-​​going battle between the vanguard and the old guard.

picture credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

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