How to publish an academic book but make the PDF freely available online?
Cambridge University Press allows authors to freely distribute electronic copies of the books that it publishes, at least in mathematics and computer science. (Of course this has to be explicitly negotiated into the publishing contract.) Two good examples are Allen Hatcher's Algebraic Topology and Steve LaValle's Planning Algorithms.
You could also just release the book on the web, let people create their own physical copies through a book-printing service like Lulu or Blurb, and rely on the quality of the text to bolster your reputation instead of a traditional publisher's imprimatur. See, for example, Pat Morin's excellent Open Data Structures. However, I don't recommend this route unless (a) you write an amazingly good book, and (b) you already have tenure.
OTexts
I just remembered that Professor Rob Hyndman had spoken about his upcoming textbook Forecasting: Principles and Practice
The entire book is available online and free-of-charge. Of course, we won’t make much money doing this, but textbooks never make much money anyway — the publishers make all the money. We’d rather create something that is widely used and useful, than have large publishers profit from our efforts.
Eventually a print version of the book will be available to purchase on Amazon, but not until a few more chapters are written.
The publisher is called "OTexts". It says on their website.
OTexts represents a new approach to university textbooks. All our books will always be completely and freely available online. Why spend hundreds of dollars on printed books which are soon out-of-date when you can have continually updated online books for nothing!
At time of posting Rob's book appears to be the first text book to be published with this publisher.
It says at time of posting under the "For Authors" section
Print royalties are shared 50-50 between the author and OTexts.
Reflections
On the face of it, this sounds perfect for an author keen to maximise academic impact.
However:
- This is a very new company.
- I'm not sure what the implications would be for grants, promotions, jobs relative to publishing with an established academic publisher.
For instance, you can try with INTECH.
From the website:
InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. Since 2004, InTech has collaborated with more than 60 000 authors and published 1720 books and 13 journals with the aim of providing free online access to high-quality research and helping leading academics to make their work visible and accessible to diverse new audiences around the world.