[sdiy] Thomas Henry books available soon

[Tim Parkhurst]

Jeez, I sleep in late on Sunday and all of the sudden there's all this
traffic on SDIY! ;-)

Basically, John I are honored to be able to do this. I think Thomas'
books are a great resource, and our main goal is just to share this
with synth builders out there.

On 2/19/06, john mahoney <jmahoney at gate.net> wrote:
> I'll chime in, here. Thanks to Andre, JB, and others for your input and
> interest in the Thomas Henry books.
>
> PDFs? Yes.
> Tim and I are already preparing PDFs of the books. We'll release the books
> as we get the PDF files produced (and after the online sales channel has
> been set up, of course).
>
> Hardcopy, too? Doubtful.
> We will offer hardcopy as an option if there is sufficient demand -- but
> it's hard to imagine why would there be, since you can easily print the PDFs
> yourself. The 566 Cookbook is only 26 pages long (plus the cover), for
> example.
>
Yeah, the extra costs in printing and postage would be reflected in
the cost of the books. I can't imagine too many people would vote for
that. One exception: we do have twenty copies of Thomas' Electronic
Drum Cookbook that we'd like to sell. These are from the last printing
that Thomas did, and they have a nice plastic binding that allows you
to easily lay the book flat (good for troubleshooting time). We'll
probably sell these for less than our usual markup to help compensate
for the postage cost, but we'll post it as soon as the details are
finalized.

> Copy protection? Hmmm...
> Feel free to weigh in on this, because we are mulling it over. It is
> tempting to use some form of password protection to "prevent piracy" (which
> the RIAA has taught me is a massive problem ;-). But people intentionally
> sharing the files would just share their passwords, too, so in the end we've
> merely inconvenienced the actual buyers. So, although I was leaning toward
> using passwords, my latest thinking is "nah."
>
> I figured that we could use a buyer's name as his/her password, assuming
> that people will be less incllned to "share" their PDFs knowing that their
> name was encrypted into them. Would you mind having to type in your name
> every time that you open these?
>
I like that. JBV's idea of a first name, last name, book name password
sounds like a good one.

There are all sorts of copy protection schemes, but nothing is
bulletproof. I think at some point, we just have to trust people. A
simple scheme is just to serve as a reminder.

> Another possibilty is some kind of textual label, like "From the library of
> Solder Monkey" at the top or bottom of every page. Just brainstorming with
> y'all...
> --
> john (not Tim Servo, but I play him online)
>
> P.S. Adobe now offers an online service to create PDF files, with a free
> trial (5 PDFs).
>       http://createpdf.adobe.com/
>

Many good ideas. Hopefully, John and I (with the help of Scott Stites
and others) can bring many other goodies to market. We've got stuff
besides the TH books in the works, so this should be fun.

Tim (when do I get to play John?) Servo
--
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein