As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published a French and Norwegian translation of the classic Free Culture book by the founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig. A bit less known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations, using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original. And because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it too. The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons Corporation. In other words, I do not earn any money from this project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative Commons is needed.
Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping. Much to my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been available in English since it was first published. In total, 24 paper books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:
| Title / language | Quantity |
|---|---|
| Culture Libre / French | 3 |
| Fri kultur / Norwegian | 7 |
| Free Culture / English | 14 |
The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Most revenue, around $10 per book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold directly by Lulu.com. The other channels give less revenue. The summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu. And Lulu.com tells me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42. No idea what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not. But it make me happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it as much as I did.
The ebook edition is available for free from Github.
If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native language, I would be happy to help make it happen. Please get in touch.