{"id":5108,"date":"2019-05-16T13:18:27","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T19:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=5108"},"modified":"2019-12-14T10:19:00","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T16:19:00","slug":"get-your-book-make-it-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/get-your-book-make-it-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Your Book, Make It Free"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, authors: free up your book and put the PDF up for download. Your book does <em>not<\/em> need to be out of print. The short version of this post is &#8220;go read <a href=\"https:\/\/www.authorsalliance.org\/resources\/rights-reversion-portal\/\">this website on rights reversion<\/a> and do it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re an author of a book, you should consider asking for the rights for it and releasing it for free. A number of prominent graphics books authors have already done so: <a href=\"https:\/\/pharr.org\/matt\/blog\/2018\/10\/15\/pbr-online.html\"><em>Physically-Based Rendering<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(from 2016!), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/an-introduction-to-ray-tracing-is-now-free-for-download\/\"><em>An Introduction to Ray Tracing<\/em><\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/resources\/shaderx\/\">first three <em>ShaderX<\/em> books<\/a>, and both volumes of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/principles-of-digital-image-synthesis-now-free-for-download\/\"><em>Principles of Digital Image Synthesis<\/em><\/a>. The free release of the book\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/webglinsights.com\/\"><em>WebGL Insights<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(from 2015) was simpler yet: the book&#8217;s editor just asked the publisher if he could put a free PDF online, and they signed a tiny contract confirming it.<\/p>\n<p>The process is pretty simple, though sometimes drawn out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Check your contract: There&#8217;s a slight chance you already have the rights, e.g., if it&#8217;s out of print.<\/li>\n<li>If not, find the person at the publisher who is in charge of book rights.<\/li>\n<li>Ask for a &#8220;reversion of rights.&#8221; There are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.authorsalliance.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/20160920-Interactive-RR-Letter-Guide.pdf\">any number of reasons<\/a> your publisher will want to do so.<\/li>\n<li>Get them to send you a form, sign it, done.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Publishers often agree (more often than you might think), but that final step can take awhile, since passing rights back to you is usually the last task on the publisher&#8217;s TODO list. Persist. Once you have the rights, you can put the book up as a PDF, web pages, etc. The book can still be sold by the publisher (if you work this out with them) and you&#8217;ll still earn royalties.<\/p>\n<p>Advantages of getting the rights and making your book free include: increased availability increases citations, nice for academics; possibly increased sales, as people find the book and want the paper version; and, helping the public interest. You could also make your book Open Access or licensed under Creative Commons, allowing its contents to be redistributed and reused more freely still.<\/p>\n<p>Like I said at the start, visit <a href=\"https:\/\/www.authorsalliance.org\/resources\/rights-reversion-portal\/\">this website<\/a> and read <a href=\"https:\/\/authorsalliance.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Documents\/Guides\/Authors%20Alliance%20-%20Understanding%20Rights%20Reversion.pdf\">their guide<\/a> through if you&#8217;re interested &#8211; it&#8217;s pretty good.<\/p>\n<p>One thing I&#8217;ll add is about PDFs. Say you get the rights but don&#8217;t have a PDF of the book. This problem is often solved by googling around. Sadly, many books are illegally available as PDFs (common knowledge among college students, so I don&#8217;t feel this is all that much of a revelation). Taking an illegal PDF and calling it your own is entirely fine in my book.<\/p>\n<p>Nicer still, you can use <a href=\"https:\/\/acrobat.adobe.com\/us\/en\/acrobat\/acrobat-pro.html\">Acrobat Pro DC<\/a>\u00a0to edit the PDF, fixing errata and putting whatever you want at the start to explain the legal status of the PDF. That software has a seven-day free trial. Me, I&#8217;m happy to host most any computer graphics book at our website; we already <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/#intro\">host about eight<\/a>. There are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.authorsalliance.org\/2016\/05\/20\/after-reversion-tracking-down-digital-copies\/\">other ways to make your book available<\/a>, too. I wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/how-to-put-a-book-on-google-books\/\">a post about how to put your book<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/\">Google Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Please contact me if you have any questions or anything I might help you with, such as contacts at publishers. And, please do it &#8211; it&#8217;s a nice thing for everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, authors: free up your book and put the PDF up for download. Your book does not need to be out of print. The short version of this post is &#8220;go read this website on rights reversion and do it.&#8221; If you&#8217;re an author of a book, you should consider asking for the rights for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5108"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5255,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108\/revisions\/5255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}