First, I haven’t written a book. But I have an idea for a book. And if I do write it, I’d care a lot more about people reading it than about making any money off of it. So my thought is that I could encourage readership by posting it on the internet for people to download freely, rather than making people pay for it.
I’d like people to be able to download it, print it off, make as many copies (printed or electronic) as they want, give copies away, etc. However, I wouldn’t like anyone to be able to claim that they wrote it, or make changes to it, or make other people pay for it.
How do I do this? Do I need to copyright it, but while granting the reader certain explicit permissions? Does simply typing “Copyright tim314, but readers have permission to do A, B, and C, but not X, Y, or Z” somewhere in the document accomplish this?
You don’t have to do anything specific in order to copyright your work. As the author, the copyright belongs to you automatically.
As the copyright holder, you can license the work under any terms which are mutually agreeable to you and the licensee. If your license says “you can read and copy this work and give it away for free, but not charge money for it,” that’s a perfectly valid license. But the onus is on you to enforce it. If someone started printing copies and selling them, you’d have to sue them to make them stop.
ETA: It’s worth pointing out that this is different from releasing a work into the public domain, where you disclaim any copyright. In this case, anybody can do whatever they want with the work, including publishing it for profit, just like the works of Shakespeare or anything else that’s fallen out of copyright over the years.
I would suggest one of the Creative Commons licenses. They have a lot to choose from. Popular ones include Attribution, which allow free redistribution as long as they credit you as the author and Attribution-ShareAlike, which allows free redistribution as long as anyone who receives the work is given the right to redistribute it.
Based on Rysto’s link, it looks like this is the license you’re looking for.
But you should also look at this page, which discusses the things you should think about before using the license. Most important might be the fact that it is non-revocable. Once you give away these rights, you can’t get them back. Think carefully before you make your decision.
One suggestion. Others have addressed the legal issue. I’d like to address a practical one. The easiest way to prevent others from modifying your work is to publish it in pdf. Text pdf’s can be converted to editable text, of course, but it’s much more work than with html’s. So, I’d have an html page for the download site, then link to the book in pdf. You can make it all one file or several small ones, depending on the nature and size of the book. No point in zipping it, btw, as text pdf’s already are about as compressed as they can be. If you don’t have the ability to produce pdf’s at present (Vista can, but XP generally cannot), there are several freeware utilities, e.g., PDFCreator, that will fill the gap.
You may want to research the (late) author Peter McWilliams. His stuff ranged from general Oprah-Chopra self-help type stuff to increasingly libertarian views, especially on pot legalization, that he wanted widely read. That link is to his site on which he made available all of his books for exactly the reason you mention. However, he actually made a living with them also as even available full-text free of charge, some of them became bestsellers. (Died totally broke, but that’s because of a huge non-copyright related legal battle with the government over his “medical marijuana” usage and farming [and we’re really not talking a Tommy Chong character who grows it in his closet and says “It’s for glaucancer… itis…” but an above board in the open “marijuana for chemo patients” business that was later illegalized and busted.)
I’m not saying your platform is pot legalization obviously, but even if you’re 180 degrees opposite from him how he made money his books available free AND still made money is interesting.
The refreshing thing is that what you’re doing, tim314, is by no means new or unusual, and it’s getting more and more common as time goes by. A fiction author who’s making money from doing it is Corey Doctorow (he likes Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, which seems like what you want), and a whole publishing house built around it is Baen Books. Of course, the Internet runs on free software including Linux and the BSDs, but seeing it take off outside of its incubator is exciting.