[diggan]

Agree. I feel there are two main audiences for technical books. Those who are interested in the subject and might have a career in/close to it in the future, and those who are interested in the subject and already work with it/similar things.

The first group won't be able to afford the book right now, but if you can still manage to give them the knowledge, they won't forget about it, and might come back to buy the book when they can afford it. I certainly did this for many books that been available for free, but as soon as I could, wanted to support the author. Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.

The second group just want to be able to review something before they buy it, and the purchase is still not just about getting the content, but supporting the person creating the content.

So by having it available for free online, you can easier reach both these groups, as otherwise you mainly get the second one (and pirate copies with varying degree of quality all over the place)

[enitihas]

> Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.

But no open source software is being sustainably developed on contributions form donation jars. There might be 1-2 exceptions, but most open source projects make pennies from donations.

[zozbot234]

The Blender open source project was started entirely from voluntary donations, and it gets very sizeable contributions to this day. The same applies to many other major projects. Even development of the Linux kernel itself and closely-related projects is largely funded via voluntary contributions to the Linux Foundation.

[ghaff]

>Even development of the Linux kernel itself and closely-related projects is largely funded via voluntary contributions to the Linux Foundation.

Development of the Linux kernel is largely funded by companies paying for developers to work on it (and by paying membership fees to the Linux Foundation to cover professional LF salaries like Linus').

[diggan]

I think the same goes for technical books. I don't have any source available for this but remember reading blog posts from authors that wrote; compared to the time spent on writing a book, the earnings doesn't justify writing the book for just the income. Rather, you do it for all the side-effects (sans income) of writing a book, exposure and the alike.

Not sure there are people who survive on only writing technical books, usually they have another job and do the book on the side of other things. At least as far as I can gather.

[ghaff]

I think that's correct about technical books for the most part. Certainly the case with me. Writing the books has been very valuable career-wise. But the money is trivial.

The difference with open source projects is that there are a lot of project leaders who in my experience get sucked into an ongoing full-time role for which they receive very little money. Such a role can lead to a good job of course. But my sense is that there are more people doing a full-timeish largely unpaid gig writing software/managing a project than in the case of technical books--which people are more likely to do as a one-off project that they may even do partly on work time.