Any interest in early drafts?

I have the DNSSec book about a third done, which isn’t bad for spending a week in the hospital this month, and am looking at various publication options. Once the book is finished it’ll be available in print, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and hopefully iTunes. But I have an option for before the book is complete. LeanPub allows authors to upload works in progress, and update them as the work proceeds.

I’m pondering something like this:

  • Offer the incomplete book on LeanPub at, say, a 20% discount. Those of you who want to see it can, and those of you who want to send feedback can.
  • Update the book on LeanPub as I write.
  • When the book is finished, upload the final manuscript to all ebook platforms. Raise the LeanPub price to match. If you bought it earlier, you still get access, of course.
  • If you follow my blog, you’re probably a fan. I have no problem giving a discount to people interested enough in my work to follow my blog. And I might even get useful feedback.

    One of my goals is to reduce the amount of non-paying non-writing work I do. (Basically, I want to reduce my monthly recurring expenses, especially time expenses.) Updating a book as I write it isn’t a huge amount of work, but if nobody’s interested, I don’t want to bother.

    So: would anyone be interested? Or should I keep writing in my bubble?

    2013 Projects and 2012 Errata

    When you set goals for a year, you need to tell people about them. The potential embarrassment of having to admit failure helps you complete the goals. With that in mind, here are my goals for 2013:

    1) I will do three short technology books through my private label (aka “self-publish”). The first, on DNSSec, is underway. Some text exists, and I’m making copious use of scratch paper and whiteboards to figure out how to explain KSKs, ZSK, and the signature and key lifecycle in a coherent manner. (If you happen to have a good resource for this, please feel free to point me at it in the comments.)

    2) I will write & self-publish one novel. If I write nothing but nonfiction, my brain freezes up and the tech books become unreadable. If I’m going to write fiction anyway, I might as well release it. Attempting to traditionally publish a novel takes more time and energy than writing a book and will probably fail, so I prefer to spend that T&E writing. The odds of the book succeeding are negligible either way, so I’d prefer to do so in the least expensive manner.

    3) If I accomplish both of these early enough, I will continue writing. I will indulge myself in trying something that’s “just crazy enough to work,” like, say, “dc(1) Mastery” or “netstat Mastery.”

    Now here’s a leftover from 2012:

    Richard Bejtlich has reviewed hundreds and hundreds of technology books over the last ten years. For a time, he was one of Amazon’s Top 100 reviewers. Each year he posts a list of the best books he’s read, and gives one book the “Best Book Bejtlich Read” (BBBR) award. The award and $5 will get me a nice gelato.

    I’ve been on the top 10 list before, in 2007, for Absolute FreeBSD, and 2006 for PGP & GPG.

    2012’s BBBR went to (drumroll): SSH Mastery.

    This comes with some caveats, mind you. Bejtlich read and reviewed only one tech book in 2012, and this is his final BBBR award. I had no competition. But I’m okay with that.

    Bejtlich no longer reviews tech books, which I personally find disappointing. (I mean, how can I not like reviews that start start off with The master writes again? That’s the sort of thing I bookmark for those nights I get really depressed and start contemplating a shot of whiskey and a small handgun.)

    Life changes, however, and he’s working in other areas now, so: Richard, so long, and thanks for all the fish. I’m still putting that last quote on the cover of the DNSSec book, though.

    Next Nonfiction Book

    I’ve made it a practice to not announce book topics or titles until the book is well underway. Writing a big book takes not less than a year (Absolute FreeBSD) and up to three years (Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd ed). Once I hand in the completed first draft to the publisher, there’s editing, tech edits, copyedit, page layout, and so on. It’s a few months to get the book into production.

    Delaying the announcement also gives me the chance to determine if the book is realistic. I’ve made no secret that I write about topics that I’m not qualified to cover. I’ve had more than one tech book that I’ve started, only to discover three chapters in that I am so not the person to write this book. Delaying announcing the topic gives me a chance to back out without anybody knowing.

    I’m trying something a little different this time. My next book will be published by Tilted Windmill Press (my private label) and much smaller than my BSD tomes. I have an outline. I’ve done the reading. My educational lab work is done (meaning that my rate of screaming “Why isn’t this working?” has dropped from thrice hourly to twice daily). And I’m doing a fairly wide variety of work with the topic in the next six months.

    The next book is on (drum roll please): DNSSec. Blame Richard Bejtlich. (I wish I could find the tweet in question, but seriously, how am I supposed to resist him declaring “You’re our only hope?” Flattery will get you anywhere. Especially if you’ve given me enough cover quote copy to last the rest of my career.)

    Writing the book concurrently with implementing DNSSec across great big piles of domains with multiple registrars should give me all sorts of problems to write about, and give my readers more benefit from my real-world pain.

    I know a lot of people don’t like DNSSec, have cogent arguments why DNSSec is poo, and really wish it would go away. They take me writing a book about it as a refutation of their arguments. It’s not. But DNSSec is here. It’s the standard. We’ve got to deal with it. And the supporting software has improved to the point where DNSSec can be implemented by the typical overworked sysadmin, rather than only crypto fans.

    DNSSec also gets you things like SSHFP records and vendor-free SSL certificates. The former is convenient. The latter will eliminate any excuse for unencrypted communications.

    Why announce this ahead of time? For one, you’ll probably see me griping about random pieces of DNSSec boneheadedness on Twitter. The savvy will be able to guess. Announcing the book will help keep my nonfiction writing focused. It’s still possible that someone will rush a book into print ahead of me, but the shorter cycle of independent publishing reduces that risk. The audience and community reaction to SSH Mastery is also encouraging; I know that if I write a good book, my readers will tell others about it, regardless of the publisher. If someone beats me to print, my readers will still support me.

    And if I write a crap book, it deserves to fail.

    (As an aside: having readers who tell their friends and co-workers about my books is freaking awesome. I could not publish books if you didn’t support my work. Thank you.)

    Ideally, I’ll have this book out for BSDCan 2013. Tilted Windmill Press is the BSDCan T-shirt sponsor, so having a book out for the conference would be a good idea.

    More questions? Too bad. That’s all I know right now. Except that now that I’ve set and announced a goal, my life will go horribly askew specifically to delay me.

    Amazon Author Rank vs Writers

    Amazon recently introduced Author Rank, where they list authors in order of popularity. I’ve had a lot of discussions about this feature and what it means to writers.

    Amazon provides a surprising number of features for authors. Their Author Central system lets me see how many of which book sold, and where, over a given time period. There’s a neat little app that shows where in the country my books sold, according to Bookscan data. Bookscan data might not be complete, but it’s more information than my twice yearly No Starch royalty statements. I know that in the last four weeks, five of my NSP books sold in the SF-Oakland-San Jose area, and 4 in Washington, DC. That’s interesting, and for a tech author those sales numbers are not too shabby.

    I choose the word “interesting” carefully. It’s interesting. But it’s not exactly useful. If these geographic sales charts show that I was consistently selling quite well in Amarillo, Texas, I might be inclined to see what’s going on down there. But the sales basically hit exactly where I expect: Silicon Valley, Washington DC, RTP, NYC, with others trailing.

    An author can spend hours trawling through his sales data this way. It’s interesting, but: this data doesn’t help you sell books. It makes sense that you’d kill a couple hours the first time you get the data, but as an ongoing thing, it just takes up time. You’d be better off writing.

    Author Central also gives graphs of how your books as a whole, or all your books, sell over time.

    sales graph

    Looking at this, I might think “Wow. What did I do the week of March 7, 2011? Why did that book do so well that week? And how can I repeat this?” The answer is, I didn’t do anything. This sales spike had nothing to do with me. I wrote a good book. Someone ordered a bunch of copies, perhaps for a test, perhaps for their company, or perhaps because the paper the book is printed on is thin and soft. All I can do is be appreciative of “the folks who bought my book,” whoever they are.

    The more insidious question would be: “why have my sales dropped since then?” I have an easy answer. My print sales have dropped, but my ebook sales have increased. Also, technology books have a lifespan. I’m pleasantly stunned that the five-year-old Absolute FreeBSD is still selling this well, but I have no right to expect this trend to continue.

    It’s conceivable that I might find a use for this data. If my books consistently sell well in Amarillo, a place not known for its high tech business, I’d probably want to investigate and see what’s happening down there. Perhaps I would somehow use Amarillo in a new book, to give a nod to that readership. But the data fits my expectations, so it won’t change anything I do.

    Also, this graph contains data. X number of book Y sold in Week Z. Those are real numbers. Not terribly useful, but interesting.

    Now consider the Amazon Author Rank graph.

    rank graph

    On October 5th, I was the #11,117th most popular author on Amazon. Think about that for a moment.

    What is popularity? How is it calculated? What is that supposed to mean? Is that an average based on the sales of all of my books, or my sales in aggregate? How are authors ranked? Without this kind of knowledge, this chart isn’t data. It’s an arbitrary rank, no better than Klout. I’d actually find my Scalzi Number more useful; I know how that’s calculated, and hence could derive a shallow meaning from it.

    This number will cause an author some kind of emotional reaction. Maybe they’re disappointed that 11,116 authors are more popular than them. Maybe they’re thrilled that hundreds of thousands of authors are less popular than them. Either way, this reaction does not help an author with their craft.

    Ranking authors by some unknown popularity algorithm? It’s like high school all over again, and just as meaningful.

    When this feature just came out, I exchanged tweets with other authors about it. Chris Sanders, author of Practical Packet Analysis, shared with the world that his author rank was 9425, a few thousand higher than mine.

    I agree that his Practical Packet Analysis is a good book. But what am I to draw from him having a higher Amazon rank than I do?

    I write the books I write. My Network Flow Analysis is the best book I can create on netflow. PPA is the best book Chris could write about Wireshark. Comparing them isn’t really possible: they’re different topics, different audiences, and completely different books. Even though both are books about networking, they are utterly different in purpose, execution, and readership.

    And what does the difference mean? Does his one book sell more copies than all of my books compared together sell less than his? Could be. Even if his books outsell mine twenty-five to one, does it matter to me?

    One of the very worst things an author can do is start comparing himself to other authors. That way lies despair and heartbreak. If I measured my success against Dean Koontz or James Patterson, or even Richard Stevens, I’d give up writing altogether. Because my books aren’t their books, my audience isn’t their audience, and my career is not their career. I write the best books I can. And my audience finds them useful enough to buy them. That’s enough.

    You want to be a more popular author? Write the best books you can. Continuously work to improve your craft. Become a better author, and readers will come. Don’t get involved in high-school popularity contests, especially ones that offer no benefit to your career, your craft, or your ego.

    Personally, I’m going to ignore Author Rank. I see no use for it. The best thing you can do is shut up and write.

    And lest someone gets the wrong idea, I like Chris. If I get to Charleston, I plan to look him up and see if he’s free for lunch. I’m sure he knows where to get good barbeque. Mind you, he can pay for it. He’s the big-name popular author, after all.

    Hey, maybe Author Rank isn’t completely useless…

    Writing New Editions

    This post is, “how is the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD coming along?” with a bit of musing on the craft of writing a second edition added in.

    I’m always shocked by the number of systems administrators ignorant of networking basics. I don’t care that they don’t know how to choose between BGP and OSPF, or that they don’t know what those acronyms stand for. That’s not relevant to most servers. But lots of them don’t know what an IP address is, or how to recognize a valid netmask, or the difference between TCP and UDP, or why there’s an /etc/protocols file. Any sysadmin who doesn’t know these things is still an amateur. My goal in writing a book is to drag people a little closer to professional.

    So, I include a chapter on networking basics in my introductory sysadmin texts, just like I include chapters on user management.

    I have a chapter on IPv4 networking in three published books. I’m writing this same chapter for the fourth time. I can’t just copy-and-paste from earlier editions. First, that would be rude. Second, my understanding of TCP/IP has changed in the last ten years, and that changes how I approach the material.

    But I can use the earlier efforts as models. Some text I can almost reuse, because it’s still the best way I know of to explain the specific topic. This will be the third time I use the dinner table analogy, for example. I still pass it through my brain to my keyboard, however, freeing myself to tweak a few words in the process.

    The most recent IPv4 chapter I wrote was for Absolute FreeBSD. In this incarnation, the chapter included a couple pages of basic binary and hexadecimal math. I looked at this, and thought “Why did I cover this? Doesn’t everybody know it?”

    Then I thought back, and realized that I included those pages because at the time I wrote the book, I spent a fair amount of energy teaching that material to my coworkers.

    I flipped back through the earlier editions of these books. Each book had one or more sections that I included because coworkers didn’t know it.

    At the moment, I’m not responsible for teaching anyone anything. I have no tech minions, and am molding nobody. It’s definitely changed my mind about what topics I cover. I suspect that the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD will contain less basic material. I’m definitely assuming that you know how to do binary and hexadecimal math, for one thing. This leaves room for more advanced topics.

    My conclusion seems to be: if you find the new edition of Absolute OpenBSD moves too fast, I suggest you get a copy of Absolute FreeBSD as well, or reread the one you have.

    (Mind you, the no-minions-to-mold is about to change. After two years of minion-free peace, I have been given a minion to mold. He’s on vacation at the moment, and has no idea what awaits him on his return. I have no desire to ruin his last few days of freedom, so we’re waiting for his first day back to tell him what he’s been sentenced to. The poor bastard.)

    So, where am I on the second edition of Absolute OpenBSD?

    If you want the minutia of my progress, search for the #ao2e hashtag on Twitter. But at a larger level, I’m writing the chapter on IPv4.

    This seems to be about 40% through the first draft of the book. The manuscript has proceeded quickly, now that I’m not moving into a house that needs work to be habitable. I’m hoping that this pace continues.

    I’ve received initial feedback on chapters 1-8 from Henning Brauer. Then the chapters go to Nathan Houle, my editor at No Starch Press, then back to me for corrections and discussion. Then they go to Peter Hansteen for formal technical review. Then back to me for correction. Then copyedit, back to me for correction, page layout, and back to me for correction.

    So, it’s not 40% done. The first draft is the hardest part, however. Doing the math, though, I see that I’ve been through an IPv4 chapter at least twenty times, given all the cycles. No wonder writing it is causing me nausea and chest pain.

    The original outline calls for a book about 400,000 words. For reference, Absolute FreeBSD is close to 300,000 words. This is too dang long. One of my goals is that my books be small enough to read in the bathtub.

    As SSH Mastery was successful, I have a resolution. I think I’ve figured out topics I can extract from the book and publish separately, without damaging the integrity of the book or its usefulness. Not everybody needs to know about, say, OpenBSD’s wireless features, but it’s certainly a topic worth covering. I can do small books on those topics and publish them as an aside, making the content available to interested readers. Assuming that the reader is a competent OpenBSD sysadmin (e.g., they’ve read Absolute OpenBSD 2nd ed or have an equivalent combination of education and experience) will let me do these books almost as easily as if it was integrated into the book. And my initial market research indicates that my readers are amenable to smaller, single-topic books.

    In summary: book is underway. More books coming.

    Keeping Friends

    I’m heading out to Oregon for Kris Rusch’s short story workshop in a little while. Additionally, I just got my story collection Vicious Redemption out in print. So, what the heck, here’s a story. It’s short enough that I’m not comfortable putting it out as a 99-cent short, but sufficiently solid that it deserves an audience.

    Warning: not for children.

    Keeping Friends

    “I’m trying to decide if I should kill myself now, or wait five minutes.”

    My precognition hadn’t warned me about Tom’s call, but I hadn’t asked it. I pressed the cellphone into my ear hard enough to hurt, trying to compensate for the crackling connection and the passing traffic. “You don’t really want to do that, dude. You still have options. There’s other meds out there.”

    “They won’t work. Nothing works. There’s no hope.”

    I sat on a bench and forced my hands to stay still. My friends are important to me – I have to keep them. If I failed, Tom might kill himself while talking to me. The thought heated my blood until the air felt cool. “Can I come down there?”

    “Don’t bother. I tried a knife, but it wasn’t sharp enough to cut through my neck.”

    Tom had fought clinical depression for two years. Medication had taken the edge off, but not enough that he could return to work. The electroconvulsive therapy his doctor had prescribed required Tom stop taking all his medications. The edge had returned, and he was using it on himself.

    “Are you holding the knife now?” I said.

    “Yes.”

    “Do me a favor. Put it down.”

    “I need to sharpen it. That’ll take both hands.”

    The phone clicked and I heard only silence, then the dial tone.

    I forced myself to take a deep breath, then another, and willed my heart to slow. “I’ll do nothing,” I said. “He’s not really going to do it. He’s just trying to get attention.” With that decision, I twisted the deformation in my brain.

    The world around me skipped, displaying shattered fragments amidst frozen moments. Tom’s cat lapping at pooled blood. Sheryl finding Tom. Accusations and counter-accusations over a closed coffin. Tears, and years of recriminations.

    My gut burned, and I shuddered back to the moment. I couldn’t do nothing.

    “I’ll call the police,” I said aloud, cementing the decision in my brain. “Give them his address. Tell them what he told me. I’m going to do that next.”

    The decision changed my future, but weakened my precognition. The new future wasn’t strong yet and hadn’t yet solidified. Colors streaked the new images, and sounds skewed from lips like a badly dubbed film. Blood on Tom’s neck. A police officer tumbling down the apartment stairs, Tom’s knife buried in his arm. The stench of urine and blood. Parallel metal bars and scored, battered Plexiglas between Tom and I, new gaps in Tom’s bared teeth as he spit at me.

    Prison would be better than a coffin, maybe. But Tom wouldn’t be my friend any more. Precognition had already stolen my family, my children, and too many friends. I couldn’t stand losing another.

    “I’ll go down there myself,” I said. “See him in person. It’s only thirty minutes to his apartment. Talk to him where he can’t hang up on me.”

    Yet another change to my future distorted the new visions to the jagged edge of uselessness. I saw shards of Tom bleeding and my fingers fumbling at a phone. Tom’s voice was unintelligible, but the anger was unmistakable. A glimpse of him at a party, the years turning his hair white; he laughed, then he saw me, and he turned away. The sudden set of his jaw reminded me of my wife when we left the divorce hearing.

    The bench wobbled beneath me, the stench of bus exhaust more bitter. Tom would never forgive anyone for finding him like that. I’d save his life, but I’d lose him.

    “I’ll call him back,” I said. “I’ll talk him out of this.” I’d never viewed four futures in quick succession. My precognition showed only an unintelligible jumble that hurt my ears and eyes and left the taste of hot copper in the back of my mouth. I didn’t think that calling Tom would delay him more than a few minutes, though.

    I licked my lips and made a call.

    “Jimmy? Listen, I just heard from Tom. He’s really really upset. I’m worried about him. You live right by him, don’t you? Could you go and check on him?”

    Jimmy would find Tom, and call for help. Tom would be there for me. Tom would never forgive Jimmy for finding him, but I’d be there to console Jimmy. My friends are important. I have to keep them.

    If you enjoy this, you might look at my other free story, my available short stories or my fiction collection. If you don’t enjoy this, that’s OK. If you now feel like crossing the street when I approach, that’s fine too.

    And now for something completely different…

    Last August a friend of mine, Colin Harvey, died of a sudden unexpected stroke. He was in my fiction critique group, and we spend several years bashing each other’s efforts. He made it as a novelist, with two books to his credit. I haven’t reached that. Yet.

    Today, I learned that one of his stories had been filmed.

    The funny thing is, this film is based on a challenge he set in the critique group, based on random overheard phrases provided by group members. Every story had to incorporate all of the phrases, intact and unedited. My phrase was about truth. It’s changed in the film, but the new line is also about truth. So, this film has my shadow in it, in a vague and indirect way.

    Consistency in Writing

    For the last couple of weeks, the SSH Mastery copyeditor has said “There’s something wrong with Chapter 13, but I can’t figure out what it is.” I told her that I had confidence in her ability to figure it out and to just do her best. (I wasn’t actually confident, but telling her that would have guaranteed that she would not have found it.) The copyedits came back this weekend, along with the following table. Continue reading “Consistency in Writing”

    Why I Give Books Away

    For a year or so I’ve wanted to write a post about the impact of book reviews, specifically on Amazon book reviews, but Anne R. Allen has saved me the trouble.

    In short: Amazon owns my writing career.

    They make their decisions based on reviews by people like you.

    And when I say “people like you,” I mean you, personally.

    The biggest thing you can do to help any author is review their book in twenty words or more, and rate it four or five stars, and post it on Amazon. (Amazon considers a 3-star review not average, but negative.)

    Today, for good or ill, Amazon owns the book business. Especially tech authors. We live and die by Amazon reviews. Reviews on other sites are nice too, but if the review isn’t on Amazon, it’s mostly shouting into the echo chamber.

    Unlicensed Book Downloads and the Writer

    (Anyone who is a big enough fan of my work to actually track down this blog is almost certainly not the target of this rant. But today, it happened one too many times.)

    I had a little bit of writing time this morning before work. How did I spend it? Sending DMCA takedown notices. You can get my books for free. Even the brand new ones. They are frequently scanned and uploaded to file sharing sites, sometimes even before I get my author’s copies. I send out DMCA notices when I find them, if the host site is in the US.

    What is the real impact of illicit book downloads on me as a writer?

    Let’s get some of the bogus arguments out of the way.

    The word piracy is ridiculous in this context. Theft is better, but that word implies scarcity. If you take a book I wrote from the store without paying for it, that’s theft. Electronic books are post-scarcity, in a certain sense. (The writing of the book is scarce, additional copies are not.) For downloading of electronic books without paying the publisher I prefer unlicensed or illicit, which aren’t perfect, but feel closer than any of the other popular alternatives.

    I don’t like the DMCA, and I strongly disagree with its technological circumvention provisions. If you buy something I wrote in ebook form, I don’t care if you have a copy on every device you own or if you print it out or if you use the Kindle loan feature and get a friend to read it. If you buy something I write as a physical book, please loan it out, mark it up, photocopy key pieces and hang them above your desk, whatever. If you buy one of my physical books direct from my publisher, they’ll give you the ebook version for free, giving you the best of both worlds. But the DMCA takedown notice is the tool by which sites like scribd and tumblr accept notifications, so I use it.

    So, what about my books? How does this affect me?

    Writing a book is like staying on a diet. Every day, you decide you’re going to write instead of doing something else.

    Writing books takes time. I have a day job. As day jobs go, it’s pretty good. I get the tools I need to do my work. I don’t have bogus meetings or daft cow-orkers. I get to choose most of the technologies I work with. Fearless Leader doesn’t call me in the middle of the night for bogus emergencies. I choose my hours. I have a private office for that couple of days a week where I condescend to grace the office with my presence. And on those days, Fearless Leader usually buys lunch. The hours are not ghastly, as in some companies, but it’s a full-time job.

    When people say “Hey, did you see that show last night?” I say “No, I was writing.”

    When the missus suggests I spend the evening watching movies with her, some nights I say “I really need to get some writing done.”

    I just moved. My new office has floral wallpaper. I detest wallpaper. Even wallpaper without cheery climbing blue and red roses. It drives me batty. I could spend my free time for a couple of weeks and transform the room into an almost elegant techie’s office.

    But moving has delayed my current books unduly. I know people are eagerly awaiting my next books. They tell me so. Repeatedly. At length. So I live with the wallpaper, and write.

    I use SSH every day, but I don’t use every piece of its functionality. I’ve never needed to use a SSH VPN. To write that chapter of the OpenSSH book, I spent two weeks of “writing time” getting SSH VPNs working between Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD machines. I use OpenBSD daily, but I don’t use systrace. I use Apache, but OpenBSD just imported nginx. I have to figure out all of these things, and understand them well enough to explain them to you. More time.

    If I just wrote fiction, I wouldn’t have to fanny about with packet sniffers and debugging logs. But fiction requires lots of research and preparation. The time is spent differently, but it’s still spent.

    That’s time I could be hanging out with my family, or at the dojo, or with friends, or even watching some of the TV series I’ve never seen but that friends have raved about (Firefly, Buffy, X-files, whatever the current hit is). Instead, I’m writing.

    I enjoy writing, but there’s a lot I want to write that’s much easier than technology books. And there’s a difference between writing something for myself, and writing something of sufficient quality that I can legitimately offer it to others.

    The fact that my books can be fun to read doesn’t mean that they’re fun books. My books are meant to help you make money. Maybe that money is your salary, maybe it’s for your the company. Maybe the financial impact isn’t direct, but my goal is that when you finish reading one of my books, you will be more knowledgeable, more highly skilled, and a more valuable technologist. Transforming your skills into cash is your job.

    Cutting out the people who help you improve yourself is downright disrespectful.

    It’s been suggested that I put up a “tip jar,” so illicit downloaders can throw me a few bucks. Unfortunately, that ignores all the other people who go into making my books a success. My NSP books are professionally edited, copyedited, tech edited, and designed. I cannot in good conscience just cut them out. That would be just as disrespectful.

    Losing money is unpleasant. But when someone says “I have so little respect for the year of your life that you spent working on this book that I’m going to give it away,” that’s downright insulting. Personally offensive. Disrespectful.

    The greatest tool any of us have is enthusiasm for our work. Every time I find where someone has uploaded one of my books without permission, it drains my enthusiasm. Tonight, I really should finish up the tech edits on the OpenSSH book so it can go to copyedit. But I think those edits will wait. I’m going to dinner with the missus instead.

    UPDATE 2015-02-10: I put up a tip jar.