Comments on: How did you convince your publisher to let you put your book online for free

By: Review: Search User Interfaces « EBI Interfaces

Review: Search User Interfaces « EBI Interfaces — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:06:38 +0000

[...] better… in an effort to maximise the impact of her writing, Hearst was able to convince CUP to allow her to also make the book available for free, in HTML format, on her website, so you [...]

By: Marti

Marti — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:26:14 +0000

James, yes, you’re right, I didn’t spend much time converting the index from latex to html, and while doing it I lost subheading indentation. Because the online version doesn’t have page numbers is was generally hard to do the index accurately; I am hoping people rely on the search box for the book version and mainly use the index for the hardcopy version. But I may go back and fix this at some point.

I was using a version of Cambridge’s style file for latex; I didn’t know of the existence of CUP-XML. Eventually I’ll make a more printable version of the online book available, maybe in a year.

By: James Lamb

James Lamb — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:52:26 +0000

I notice in the HTML index to your book you have lost all the subheadings from the index as shown in the Amazon “view inside” version. I does mean that many topics are missing from the index – I presume this was accidental?
Also, was your book done using CUP-XML? If so, couldn’t CUP create an html version effectively?

By: Marti

Marti — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:08:28 +0000

David, thanks so much for this anecdote; fingers crossed that it also drives more sales of the book offered freely. My publisher says it will be out by the end of the month.

By: David Meerman Scott

David Meerman Scott — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:46:41 +0000

I worked with Wiley to make my book World Wide Rave free on Kindle for a week back in March. I get the same questions — how did you get the publisher to do it?

Interestingly, the same month we did the free Kindle book, my previous book The New Rules of Marketing & PR hit the BusinessWeek bestseller list. I am convinced that the huge buzz of the free book drove sales of the other.

David

By: Marti

Marti — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:24:36 +0000

Great! I hope the advice is useful. Search over news is a tough problem.

By: Katja

Katja — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:52:38 +0000

Just a quick note of thanks! Finding your book was very timely as I am embarking on a full redesign of a massive news website. Search is so critical to success and is often overlooked in favour of getting the look and feel right or putting buttons in the right place!

Great work!

By: Marti

Marti — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:30:37 +0000

So it looks like we’re in agreement — let’s hope it’s really true, because that way even more publishers would be willing to go this route.

And I’m so glad you are really reading the book. That in itself is impressive! I expect to see a review on your blog at some point ;^>

By: Greg Linden

Greg Linden — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:57:53 +0000

That sounds about right, Marti. When making the book freely available online, there is a minor loss in sales to a relatively small number of people who would have bought the book but now do not. That loss usually is overwhelmed by improved word-of-mouth sales due to a large number of people seeing the book who never would have otherwise.

There is another effect where the physical copy with an online copy is more valuable than a physical copy alone, but I’d guess that’s a smaller influence.

Great book, Marti. I’m most of the way through it now and very much enjoying it. Interesting look at search from a HCI perspective along with a great survey of recent work in the field.

By: srikanth

srikanth — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:11:07 +0000

This is really awesome! Congrats on finishing it, and for making it available online.