While I can understand that it annoyed him, his response is/was out of all proportion: the book is by most accounts finished. He's had several offers to get it published which would cost him nothing, including questions about whether a bounty could convince him. Whichever option would certainly net him some money, with little to no further work on it, but he's refused our of some combination of principle and insistence of only letting it be offset printed.
Uh oh, so it is all Babel's fault?
His choice of course, but not very rational - he's pretty much thrown away a huge amount of work he's already done while people are *still* regularly begging him to take their money. Even an unfinished draft copy released as a PDF only would get a decent amount of sales.
Uh oh, so it is all Babel's fault?
It's particularly ridiculous because the success of the Amiga is deeply intertwined with piracy - without it, his potential market for his first book would have been far smaller. And as many says here: For reference works, while it's great to have a scanned copy, having a paper copy too is fantastic.
Uh oh, so it is all Babel's fault?
I had the German edition of his first book, and I cherished it (unfortunately it got lost in a move at some point) - it was fantastic. And it probably vastly improved my German... I'd buy the second edition in a heartbeat if he chose to publish it just of out of nostalgia. Even if only a PDF.
But do you actually write software for Amiga anymore? Is this just about nostalgia to you?
There are any number of possible business models we choose to not enable because we need to strike a balance. Yet all our experience is that a lot of people put something of substance together even without the guarantee or even chance of an income. And *the vast majority* of authors of books - *especially* technical books - never make a profit on their work even if you account for their time at minimum wage.
If you write for the royalties, you'd be far better off taking a second job working minimum wage and putting your extra income in shares. If you write fiction or certain very specific genre non-fiction books (like self-help books, though a lot of those ought to qualify as fiction) you stand a chance, though extremely tiny, of making it big. If you write technical books, you pretty much don't. If you write technical books for niche systems and do it for the money, you're not very bright.
Uh oh, so it is all Babel's fault?
Most people writing technical books understands this: They write because they care about the subjects, or to create a reputation for themselves. In that case piracy is no big deal, or often helpful.
Uh oh, so it is all Babel's fault?
In Babel's case he seems to have expected to make much more than he did *and* taken personal offence at the thought that his book is not read only from his precious offset-printed paper-book. That's ok. It's his "baby" and his choice. But his expectations appears to have been and be completely out of whack with reality. That substantially diminishes my sympathy.
It is his own work and he can do whatever he wants with it. I would like to buy his book too. But there is no book to buy and I cant demand anyone to publish book because I would like to see that happen.
