I’m the author of this book. Throughout the years Hacker News has been really useful source in learning about the latest developments of copyright intersecting with the information society—it often seems like hackers are more tuned in on the latest developments in intellectual property than most creatives. Note that in art I also include programming—there’s a chapter dedicated to code.
Making good on the title, the book was created with open source tools (html2print, similar to page.js) and is licensed CC-BY-NC. The size also fits snugly under a photocopier.
I would like to buy the print edition, but shipping costs more than the book itself... Strangely, it wouldn't feel as ridiculous if you proposed a pricier hardcover version.
One question: what would be your opinion if somebody were to post here a public link to a pdf copy of the book?
If you live in a medium sized city, there’ll probably be a book store focused on art books that stocks it or can order it for you. Many museum book stores have it as well. Might sound old school, but there are apparently quite some people who shop this way because for a niche topic it has done well.
There’s fairly little marketing, it all hangs on the publisher having good connections with distributors, that have good relations with book stores, and then have a pitch and cover design that are convincing enough for these book stores to stock.
As someone often creating digital content, I was impressed by how well these networks function. The book does not have a lot of online presence, yet it still found its way around the world.
When it comes to the digital version, I made it myself, because I figured that it also needed to circulate this way and that it talks to another audience. However, not doing much marketing for it other than posting on social media, there are very little sales. Visits to the website don’t really convert to eBook sales, so I think the audience I have at the moment prefers the physical medium. In posting on Hacker News I was curious if this was going to be different.
When it comes to the license, it permits people sharing the PDF. Ideally for me this means people mailing it to their friends, but I think it includes hosting on a public platform too. Because of the NC clause, to be sure the platform that hosts it should also be non-commercial, so I imagine someone could share it on their personal blog for example. This will probably happen at some point. It’s a bit of an ambiguous feeling, I realise it’s a consequence of the choice I made and that it will help the material reach more people, at the same time it doesn’t feel great to loose control. At least I hope I’ll be good enough at SEO so that people continue to realise it exists for sale :) After all that’s how paying for digital media often works, as a decision to want to support the author rather than a necessity to access the content.
> When it comes to the license, it permits people sharing the PDF. Ideally for me this means people mailing it to their friends, but I think it includes hosting on a public platform too.
It definitely does!
It was a bit surprising that you did not offer a freely downloadable pdf file for the book yourself. Anyhow, if the book is minimally relevant it will appear on library genesis for all to see. Time to stop pretending that this does not happen.
For an anecdotal data point, I systematically buy one or more printed copies of scientific and technical books whose authors distribute freely a digital copy. For example, GNU manuals and FSF publications, as well as many math books, including quite famous text books (my favorite, Ian MacKay inference textbook where you can download even the .tex sources!).
I still hesitate where to buy the physical copy of your book, though. It sells in amazon for 25EUR, but the sole review says that it is a low-quality print-on-demand thing. I would happily pay 50EUR if I was sure to obtain a high-quality print, well bound, with crisp text and figures and pages that do not fall apart. But then again, I'm a fastidious bibliophile and probably not representative at all.
>I would happily pay 50EUR if I was sure to obtain a high-quality print, well bound, with crisp text and figures and pages that do not fall apart. But then again, I'm a fastidious bibliophile and probably not representative at all.
Since the book sells mainly in art book shops I’d say you are representative of its public in the sense that the physical and visual design aims to be solid and at a higher level than for ex. most technical books. It’s offset printed, generous margins, nice paper stock, the spine is supple.
It’s not easy for me to know what happened with the copy the Amazon reviewer got. Since Amazon sold them this copy I’d expect them to reply and fix the problem (send a new book) but that’s probably too much to expect!
The chain is long, and I can’t 100% guarantee you that a bookshop sells you a copy in good shape but it should be no problem to return a misprinted one.
> It was a bit surprising that you did not offer a freely downloadable pdf file for the book yourself. Anyhow, if the book is minimally relevant it will appear on library genesis for all to see. Time to stop pretending that this does not happen.
My initial idea with having the eBook for sale instead of for free was that indeed it would pop up on Library Genesis, and for once the license actually allows it, but people would also buy it, giving me an extra income stream (I make more from an eBook than a physical book) and not making the publisher too nervous (after all, they might think that the free PDF would eat into sales of the physical book). It’s quite possible I’ll change this in the future, I’m evaluating it.
Yes! Personally I don’t like DRM at all. It makes the legitimate product inferior to the pirated copy, which used to never be the case. And I like the idea of my work surviving migrations between devices and operating systems.
Thanks! I tend to think my last name was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy—whenever I wrote something half-decent, people would point at my last name and tell me I was supposed to be a writer. Never happened for anything else I knew how to do. However irrational that is, I’m sure it influenced my self-image to some extent.
Then again, back when the name was first introduced, it probably didn’t refer to author in the modern sense, but to a person in the community who, unlike most, was literate (knew how to read and write).
> back when the name was first introduced, it probably didn’t refer to author in the modern sense, but to a person in the community who, unlike most, was literate (knew how to read and write).
I wonder, could you talk about the process of getting this published? Was this your first book, did you have a pre-existing relationship with the publisher?
She’s a designer / writer / teacher / curator who wrote and designed some amazing books including Thinking With Type. I did one of the things she suggests, make a sample chapter that would be indicative both of the writing and design: https://ericschrijver.nl/assets/legal_advice_for_artists_sam...
Of course that’s a lot of work, I did have some funding for this stage as part of a talent development grant of the Cultural Industries Fund NL. I could have sent the proposal to many publishers but I soon tried with Onomatopee. They’re quite a small outfit but they have a good reputation for visual art and graphic design books. With publishing getting easier, I feel both shops, critics and the public rely even more on the reputation of publishers, record labels etc. as a proxy for quality.
That’s a bit ironic, but it also makes sense, because you need all the help you can get if you want to somehow sift through the wealth of material that’s being published each day.
Working with a small publisher, I figured it would be easier to get the book out without too much compromises. My hunch was that a large publisher might be scared of having a CC license, using repurposed images etcetera. I haven’t tried so I don’t know! I tend to think one of the advantages of a mainstream publisher would be that they can devote more resources to press (there wasn’t so much for this book). But my publisher has proven really effective in getting it into specialist bookshops so I’m quite happy.
PS: they also didn’t require copyright transfer, which is great! Money-wise, each project they do starts with a big spreadsheet to see what is possible. Of course you want to have an affordable price, a nice printing, solid copy editing, decent remuneration for the author, but it can be difficult to have everything at once so you start tweaking variables until you have something where your break even point seems attainable. I managed the collaboration with the copy editor, designer and printer myself. I’m a designer too so it felt good to have this control. This might be unusual in larger publishing houses but in the world of art book publishing I think it’s not uncommon.
Thanks! With regards to NSFW, I added it, it didn’t cross my mind, these being drawings rather than photographs made them feel less explicit but that’s relative I imagine.
“When this book’s designer came up with the title, Copy This Book, she was playing off Abbie Hoffman’s guide to counter-cultural living Steal This Book (1971), just like Oakland-based hip-hop band The Coup did with Steal This Album (1998), later joined by Detroit punk rock band The Suicide Machines with Steal This Record (2001) and Armenian-American heavy metal band System of a Down with Steal This Album! (2002). Robert Greenwald made Steal This Movie! (2000) and Paraguay Press published an artist’s book by Dora Garcia entitled Steal This Book (2009).”
(Chapter 5.2 on writing)
So she thought of Abbie Hoffman… but when she suggested it my first association was System of a Down as well :)
This book looks interesting, but I feel a certain (juvenile?) aversion to the advice offered in the linked excerpt. I think copyright law is a plague on cultural production, and everything has been getting progressively worse since the death of the rapidshare mp3 blog, siloing of content, technological advancement of DRM, automated DMCAA take-downs, etc. Playing by the rules seems like admitting defeat to me. Might as well get a real job.
I love those Richard Prince Instagram screenshots too, no shame.
Artist’s don’t like to play by the rules in general, but if they ignore copyright they also need to find a way to fly under the radar. Which in turn can diminish the visibility of what they do.
So there’s a practical impetus for getting to know these rules. The book is indeed full of practical advice on how to work within them. But in doing so, it also explains the paradoxes of copyright, and I hope, sows the seeds for a more critical attitude towards it.
You obviously already have a critical attitude, but for most artists it’s not so pronounced, and also more ambiguous: many artists are quite happy to support copyright, as long as it protects their work, however, they’re not quite so happy with copyright protecting the work of others when they want to use it as part of their own. I hope the readers challenge their intuitions a bit.
You're half-right. There are a lot of noncommercial or personal infringements that are being overprosecuted by either zealous litigants or outright fraudsters. However, at the same time, there are also a lot of artists who misrepresent or misunderstand what they actually do and don't own. The kind of people who will scream about how "the Internet is public domain" on one end, but also that someone with money "stole their idea". Likewise, there are also artists that are genuinely getting ripped off, but don't really have the means to fight back[0]. This is more common than you think, and I feel like this book is aimed at that group of people.
[0] This is why you have lots of bots that steal Twitter art and resell it as T-shirts or NFTs.
It uses Fastspring, a platform for selling digital products and services. I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with sales tax, VAT or coding some kind of digital fulfilment workflow so I went with them.
I deliberately did not go the route of the walled garden stores (iBooks Kindle etc.) since I liked the idea of providing DRM free files.
Thanks for your feedback though. What would you suggest as a way for indie authors to sell eBooks?
OK I ran through the checkout process and see what form you mean. It’s true that entering details makes sense for the CC payment but not for Paypal. I use a readymade FastSpring storefront and not the more sophisticated JavaScript library, this is how it worked out of the box… I’ll get in touch with FastSpring support to see what to do about this.
Making good on the title, the book was created with open source tools (html2print, similar to page.js) and is licensed CC-BY-NC. The size also fits snugly under a photocopier.