"DRM-free" scares the s*** out of me

if you hate writing so much why do you even do it?

Those people who were pirating your book were never going to pay for it in the first place. This is the same, tired, bullshit argument for DRM we hear from video game publishers. A piracy does not equal a lost sale.

I agree with you 100% Tom! I own 2 of your books, Time Management for sysadmins and TPOSANA, both great books. I bought both as hard copies and the ebook versions from O'Reilly.

I know how hard it is to write, heck I often feel like writing something interesting on my blog once in a while and never get to it. I like writing in general but it's hard work to write a book, and as you say it takes a lot of dedication.

Unfortunately, I don't think this trend of finding your work in /tmp directories on random servers and being shared in other places will ever fully end. This is not always because of unscrupulous people who want to steal, from what I have seen personally from first-hand experience it's because of:

1. People who are in countries where it is impossible to buy the book. They will readily scour the web or other places just to get a badly photocopied version, doesn't matter if it's not aligned properly and skewed :-)

2. People who are in countries where there is a huge market in knock-off copies of books. These are books that are somehow re-printed (maybe from photocopies) and rebound and sold as if they were the original books. These are of much lower quality, both in terms of paper and the binding. Why do these exist? It's because the people in these countries can't afford to pay for the original version, and also because in most cases the original is not available, and all bookstores only carry the cheap knock-offs.

3. Students who can't or won't pay.

4. People who just don't realise or don't care even if you explain to them how hard it is. They are too used to being able to bittorrent everything, and think that it's cool to say "print is dead" as if it died 15-20 years ago. They feel ashamed when their friends say to them: You paid for that? You idiot!

Let's see how things go though. One thing good about ebooks I suppose is that you could charge less and distribute easily in poor countries, but that is usually up to the publisher, and a lot of them are not so enlightened it seems.

he never said anything about hating it. just because you love doing it doesn't mean it magically stopped being difficult.

Hmm, I feel your pain, but its a really tough problem to figure out if having your stuff distributed far and wide by piracy is a net gain or a net loss. I lean towards net gain, but I can't prove it.

I may be atypical, but I have anywhere from 50-100 real, physical, subject to gravity books on my shelves SOLELY because I could quickly download them and give them a quick scan when my interest was piqued by something online. Had I been required to go to the library or a bookstore to do that quick read, it would likely not happen, and neither would the follow-up purchase.

I also have several hundred virtual books scattered around my file system that aren't purchased and likely never will be, because they didn't pass the quickread test or weren't what I needed.

However, consider the fact that I now know of this book, its author and a little about the content. I will never purchase it, but I may well tell others about it. In this scenario, I believe its obvious the author has come out ahead.

That said, I think it truly sucks that we've never figured out a usable micro-payment system to reward content creators.

So, writing is hard? Yes. But so is practically any other job.

There's no god given right to earn a sustainable income doing the things you like, but still you chose the job, so you gotta live with it's ups and downs.

Teaching children is hard and only sometimes rewarding, but it kills your knees and back. Still, they don't whine to the generally public.

There's never been a working DRM-scheme and there most probably never will be, deal with it. Stop writing and complaining or get another job, sry, but that's the reality of life.

Tom,

Just wanted to drop a note and say "thanks" for taking the high road here and, despite your fears, helping to support a DRM-free world.

It's nice to be able to read your books via whatever device I happen to have on me - my Android phone, my iPad, or my PC - and via whatever app I like to use on each. Or via a dead tree, should I be feeling excessively hipster-ish. :)

-Kameron

He does not hate it, he is just saying that it takes effort. Even when you do something that you love, and i am sure he loves writing, it takes effort to schieve results.

I know I first read your pirated books and later bought the dead trees version because they were so good. But if I now want to read them on my e-reader in epub format, I would have to re-buy them again.

Thank you for your books. I wish more sysadmins read them.