Get Your Book, Make It Free

Hey, authors: free up your book and put the text up for download. Your book does not need to be out of print. The short version of this post is “go read this website on rights reversion and do it.”

If you’re an author of a book, you should consider getting the rights for it and putting the text up as a PDF or web pages. A number of prominent graphics books authors have made their works free: Physically-Based Rendering (from 2016!), An Introduction to Ray Tracing , the first three ShaderX books , both volumes of  Principles of Digital Image Synthesis , and WebGL Insights (from 2015), to name a few (that last one, WebGL Insights , may not have had a reversion of rights to the editor, but the effect is the same – the publisher let the PDF become a free download).

The process is pretty simple, though sometimes drawn out:

• Check your contract: maybe you already have the rights, if a certain amount of time has passed, etc.
• Find the person at the publisher who is in charge of book rights.
• Ask for a “revision of rights.”
• Get them to send you a form, sign it, done.

Even if the publisher agrees, the last step can take awhile, since passing rights back to you is often seen as the last task on the publisher’s list. Persist. Once you have the rights, you can put the book up on the web as a PDF, web pages, etc. The book can still be sold by the publisher (if you work this out with them) and you’ll still earn royalties.

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; helping the public interest. You could also make your book Open Access or under Creative Commons, allowing its contents to be redistributed and reused more freely still.

Like I say, visit this website and read their guide through if you’re interested – it’s pretty good.

One thing I’ll add is about PDFs. Say you get the rights but don’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’t feel this is all that much of a revelation). Taking an illegal PDF and calling it your own, as the rights owner, is entirely fine in my book.

Nicer still, you can use Acrobat Pro DC to 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, so work fast. Me, I’m happy to host most any computer graphics book PDFs at our website; we alreadyhost about eight. There are other ways to make your book available , too.

Please contact me if you have any questions or anything I might help you with, such as contacts at publishers. And, please do it – it’s a nice thing for everyone.