New run of Guru Book cancelled due to pirate copy in circulation

[TjLaZer]

31.  Doomy

[A6000]

nOw2 wrote:
1. TjLaZer
2. AltRN8
3. CountZero
4. Hans
5. tiffers
6. Tahoe
7. AmigaDave
8. AmigaHeretic
9. madsjm
10. MrZammler
11. Firedawg
12. Marcb
13. buzz
14. OSS542
15. Andeda
16. A6000
17. Splurge
18. Trekie_J
19. CaptainMooMoo
20. Matt_H
21. Gavilan
22. Fester
23. Nyle
24. ZeBeeDee
25. Webmany
26. Joe Torre (prepay=Y)
27. LoadWB (prepay=Y)
28. twizzle
29. nOw2

Would amigakit and other retailers be prepared to order 10 copies each for stock?

[CD32Freak]

Why invest lots of money for a reprint when you can use a service like CafePress Self Publishing?  :-? There is a base price and you choose the retail price and earn the difference between the retail price and their base price :idea:

[Cass]

1. TjLaZer
2. AltRN8
3. CountZero
4. Hans
5. tiffers
6. Tahoe
7. AmigaDave
8. AmigaHeretic
9. madsjm
10. MrZammler
11. Firedawg
12. Marcb
13. buzz
14. OSS542
15. Andeda
16. A6000
17. Splurge
18. Trekie_J
19. CaptainMooMoo
20. Matt_H
21. Gavilan
22. Fester
23. Nyle
24. ZeBeeDee
25. Webmany
26. Joe Torre (prepay=Y)
27. LoadWB (prepay=Y)
28. twizzle
29. nOw2
30. Cass


Sad... Just a few days ago I asked about the English reprint. I was about to buy the German version, but my German is poor.

Now, regarding the torrent :
-1. The new book is updated, so a proggramer will make the most of it.
-2. I've seen and touched the paperback version (the older, english version), and I guarantee you that is of great quality, and no printer or screen version compares to it (for practical reasons it's best the paperback, for collectors is a must, great work!)

[jiminy]

1. TjLaZer
2. AltRN8
3. CountZero
4. Hans
5. tiffers
6. Tahoe
7. AmigaDave
8. AmigaHeretic
9. madsjm
10. MrZammler
11. Firedawg
12. Marcb
13. buzz
14. OSS542
15. Andeda
16. A6000
17. Splurge
18. Trekie_J
19. CaptainMooMoo
20. Matt_H
21. Gavilan
22. Fester
23. Nyle
24. ZeBeeDee
25. Webmany
26. Joe Torre (prepay=Y)
27. LoadWB (prepay=Y)
28. twizzle
29. nOw2
30. Cass
31. Jiminy

[amigadave]

Good catch on the double 27s nOw2.

I guess there are a few more interested people here that want this book than I thought.  Has anyone notified the other Amiga websites of our little list?

I have been unable to use my password, or create a new password at AmigaWorld.net for a few months.  and their random password creator/reset mechanism does not work, so I can't get in to create a new password.  That plus I can't find any email addresses of the site administrators to tell them of the problem, so I can't get any help to fix the problem.  This is the only site that I have time to be active in (it's my favorite), so I think I get deleted from AW.net due to lack of activity.

[amigadave]

Finally got my AW.net login fixed and posted over there about this list of buyers.

I also had another thought, how many of you buyers would prepay by buying a download version first with the agreement to have your credit card charged again for a printed version only after the book was printed and on its way to you in the mail?  I know that I would participate in such an idea.  That way I have something for the money I have spent on the download, that money helps them fund the publishing of the actual book, and then my credit card is not charged for the actual book until it is ready for shipment to me.  Andreas gets some money now and a promise for more money later when the book exists and is ready for shipment and he already has the list of buyers and their credit card numbers.

What do you think?

[CodeSmith]

1. TjLaZer
2. AltRN8
3. CountZero
4. Hans
5. tiffers
6. Tahoe
7. AmigaDave
8. AmigaHeretic
9. madsjm
10. MrZammler
11. Firedawg
12. Marcb
13. buzz
14. OSS542
15. Andeda
16. A6000
17. Splurge
18. Trekie_J
19. CaptainMooMoo
20. Matt_H
21. Gavilan
22. Fester
23. Nyle
24. ZeBeeDee
25. Webmany
26. Joe Torre (prepay=Y)
27. LoadWB (prepay=Y)
28. twizzle
29. nOw2
30. Cass
31. Jiminy
32. Codesmith

[jiminy]

I'm not too keen on giving up my credit card number.  I'd gladly Paypal a refundable deposit though.

[Krischan76]

Paypal? Are you serious? ;-)

Click.

[pVC]

1. TjLaZer
2. AltRN8
3. CountZero
4. Hans
5. tiffers
6. Tahoe
7. AmigaDave
8. AmigaHeretic
9. madsjm
10. MrZammler
11. Firedawg
12. Marcb
13. buzz
14. OSS542
15. Andeda
16. A6000
17. Splurge
18. Trekie_J
19. CaptainMooMoo
20. Matt_H
21. Gavilan
22. Fester
23. Nyle
24. ZeBeeDee
25. Webmany
26. Joe Torre (prepay=Y)
27. LoadWB (prepay=Y)
28. twizzle
29. nOw2
30. Cass
31. Jiminy
32. Codesmith
33. pVC

[avanham]

1. TjLaZer
2. AltRN8
3. CountZero
4. Hans
5. tiffers
6. Tahoe
7. AmigaDave
8. AmigaHeretic
9. madsjm
10. MrZammler
11. Firedawg
12. Marcb
13. buzz
14. OSS542
15. Andeda
16. A6000
17. Splurge
18. Trekie_J
19. CaptainMooMoo
20. Matt_H
21. Gavilan
22. Fester
23. Nyle
24. ZeBeeDee
25. Webmany
26. Joe Torre (prepay=Y)
27. LoadWB (prepay=Y)
28. twizzle
29. nOw2
30. Cass
31. Jiminy
32. Codesmith
33. pVC
34. avanham

[kolla]

In other news, reprints of the Complete Works of William Shakespear have been cancelled due to the online existance of the said texts.

Mr. Shakespear has been unavailable for a comment. :roll:

[Hans_]

Ok, I sent an email directly to Ralph regarding this, and he told me that I could post his reply on the Amiga forums, so here it is:

Dear Hans,

I appreciate your support, but this is not
a question of how many copies could be sold.

Let me try to provide some background:

Piracy is a fact of life in the digital age, and
current copyright law is certainly past its prime.

The new Guru Book, however, wasn't a commercial project
to begin with, and since I didn't expect to make any money
off it, I wasn't too worried about the old RTF/OCR version
(which I even mentioned on my Amiga web page). In fact, it's
been fun to dust off all of my old Amiga equipment, tools,
and documentation. (Though I have to admit that I used
Emacs and TeX on a Linux box to prepare the new edition.)

But claiming that pirates aren't customers anyhow
doesn't quite hit the nail on the head, because
this is where the line is getting blurry:

The new 300-dpi scan was prepared and disseminated not
by Joe Average Pirate with too much time on his hands.
It was a fellow Amiga enthusiast who knew exactly that
an enhanced version was being worked on. Nonetheless, he
decided to make the torrent available - just days before
the extended edition was to go to the printer -, which -
in my very humble opinion - exhibits an enormous amount
of disrespect for somebody else's creative work.

Maybe he considered free availability of the
1993 version more important than the update.

Well, so be it.

As I wanted the reprint to be of the highest possible
quality, print-on-demand was out of the question. Offset,
however, requires a certain minimum number of copies. Let's
face it: this is 2008; the audience for a book like this is
microscopic, and the new scans didn't make it any larger.

So why am I not making it available electronically?

I believe that text needs to be written not only to the
audience, but also with the target _medium_ in mind. An
article I write for my web site will look different from
one to be published in a printed magazine; the original
plain-text list of FAQs I wrote for the Usenet newsgroup
de.etc.sprache.deutsch differs markedly from my web site
http://faql.de etc.

The Guru Book was "designed" to be published on paper.

Yes, it would be nice to have an electronic edition, but
that would require a "redesign" I cannot reasonably spend
any time on. And no, I don't consider PDF adequate (which
the pirate was well aware of, by the way).

I do not depend on writing copyrighted works for a living,
but I feel that the cause of those who do (and thus society
as a whole) is best supported by me _not_ releasing the new
extended edition of the Guru Book.

The decision didn't come lightly. Please respect it - and
try to provide for an environment in which creative workers
are encouraged - and can afford - to share their work.

Sincerely

Ralph

http://babel.de

P. S.: Feel free to forward this message
to an Amiga forum of your choice.

So there you have it. I'm still hoping that he may reconsider at some point, but it looks like the market would have to be big enough to support offset printing. The estimates that I've seen put the threshold for offset printing being more economical than digital prints at 500-2000 copies (the large margin is because it depends on many factors).

Hans

[kolla]

So why is it cancelled? I dont really see the answer there.

[HenryCase]

avanham wrote:
1. TjLaZer
2. AltRN8
3. CountZero
4. Hans
5. tiffers
6. Tahoe
7. AmigaDave
8. AmigaHeretic
9. madsjm
10. MrZammler
11. Firedawg
12. Marcb
13. buzz
14. OSS542
15. Andeda
16. A6000
17. Splurge
18. Trekie_J
19. CaptainMooMoo
20. Matt_H
21. Gavilan
22. Fester
23. Nyle
24. ZeBeeDee
25. Webmany
26. Joe Torre (prepay=Y)
27. LoadWB (prepay=Y)
28. twizzle
29. nOw2
30. Cass
31. Jiminy
32. Codesmith
33. pVC
34. avanham

34 potential buyers, good work people!
I heard about this list from AmigaDave (thanks mate!) when he posted about it on AW.net, but I didn't realise it had gotten so long. Anyway, I thought it was a good idea to let all Amiga users, not just those who use a.org, to make their voice heard about wanting the Amiga Guru Book, so I created an online petition and informed a number of Amiga websites about it. The petition link is here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?4m1ga123&1

Thanks to all of those who have already signed it. It's currently got 33 signatures, and it was only created about 8 hours ago. Pretty good going I think. If you've signed the a.org list and haven't signed the petition yet, please do so, the combined forces of the a.org list and the new petition will make a much more compelling message. It is really quick to sign the petition too.

I posted news about the petition on the following Amiga websites (in no particular order):
amiga.org, amigaworld.net, amigans.net, aros-exec.org, English Amiga Board, arosworld.org, morphzone.org.
Those are all the Amiga websites I am a member of. Can members of amigaweb.net and other Amiga forums (ones in non-English languages for example, as they might have members who could make use of the English language version of the book) please spread the word about the petition.

As for the reply Hans got from Ralph:
"As I wanted the reprint to be of the highest possible
quality, print-on-demand was out of the question. Offset,
however, requires a certain minimum number of copies"

I wasn't aware that print-on-demand offered a lower quality of book, I'll have to look into that. In any case, signing the petition will help Ralph see that he has the numbers of buyers needed for a print run.

Thanks.