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The Book  Download 66 pages, PDF, 1.4 MB Preface 1. BSK 2. The Amedeo Story 3. HIV.NET 4. HIV Medicine 5. Flying Publisher 6. Free Medical Information 7. Amedeo Textbook Awards Perspectives The Awards Preface Rationale Awards Rules and Conditions Application Books Exclusive Sponsorship Donations
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The Amedeo Challenge back
Free Medical Information: in just 100 pages, this booklet provides you with all you need to produce a successful medical textbook - and publish it as a free PDF on the Internet. In recent years, doctors have seen how amazingly self-sufficient they have become in spreading medical information. Thanks to computer technology and the Internet, they do not need medical publishers anymore if they want to transmit their knowledge to the world. Based on his 15 years of experience in medical publishing, Bernd Sebastian Kamps (BSK) offers a detailed description of all stages of textbook production, from defining the project, selecting the co-authors and fixing the deadlines to building the website, printing, marketing, distributing, and negotiating with the sponsors. Free Medical Information is a book for future publishers and authors, for doctors and students - and for all those who would like to know how medical textbooks are produced today. In the 25 months following the publication in May 2005, the free PDF was downloaded more than 250,000 times (see download counter). HIV, SARS, Influenza It was the HIV Medicine experience that inspired BSK to write this publishing guide for physicians. At the 2003 Paris Conference of the International AIDS Society, Roche handed out 3,000 copies to the participants. In comparison: over the following year, the free PDF version of the book was downloaded from the Internet more than 24,000 times (Table 6.1). In this case, Internet readers outnumbered readers of the printed book by 8:1.
* "Downloads" are potential readers. Just as for people who buy a book, not everyone actually reads it; nor does everyone who downloads a PDF. ** These books were printed at 2,000 to 3,000 copies each. n.a. = not available
Also in 2003, BSK, Hoffmann, et al., published SARS Reference in three successively updated PDF editions. The book was downloaded more than 50,000 times over a 12-month period and translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Vietnamese (see www.sarsreference.com/sarsref/lang.htm). Two reviews were published in Science and in the British Medical Journal. Finally, in 2006, BSK, Hoffmann and Preiser published Influenza Report. The result: 34,500 downloads in a year and translations into Chinese, Croatian, German, Indonesian, Mongolian, Serbian, and Slovenian. A new business model: printed Book + free PDF Offering a free PDF of a commercially available medical textbook seems to be a contradiction in terms: Why should a book in print sell if it is available as a free PDF on the Internet? Isn't it reasonable to assume that the free PDF prevents potential customers from buying the printed book? Experience shows: you get money for books, but peanuts for PDFs. In reality, the question is not about money. When a free PDF has 10 to 100 more readers than a printed book, which is not free, the real question is: "Do you prefer money or readers? money or independence? money or reputation?" Physicians who prefer readers over money are richly rewarded: When the first edition of Tuberculosis 2007 was published in May 2007, the download counter showed one download per minute, day and night, over 14 days. That is immensely gratifying - and most certainly better than money. "Hands on your heart", asked BSK during a presentation at the 10th National Conference on Infectious Diseases in Porto, Portugal, in October 2006, "was money an important issue when you wrote medical articles? Have you calculated how much you earned per hour for your writing activity? Are you sure that you earned more than a teenager who sells hamburgers at junk food restaurants? - The champagne, Mesdames et Messieurs, is for the editors, not for us. The editors drink champagne out of our skulls, and we are left with the peanuts anyway." Coming back to the question, "Can you sell the printed book if the content of the book is on the Internet as a free PDF?", BSK proposes an answer as simple as it is surprising: yes, you can - by increasing your market share. The freely available Internet PDF is the best possible publicity for a book, and competitor "print only" books will have a difficult standing against a combination of "free PDF + printed book". "If you are a medical writer and if money is your primary motivation for writing", BSK continued in Porto, "you should consider not writing anymore. Those who publish for free will soon throw you out of the market. Imagine 5 medical teams, each of them writing and publishing equally brilliant medical textbooks on the same subject. Assume that 4 teams decide to follow a traditional way of publishing - with a medical editor and no free PDF - whereas the fifth team offers free and unrestricted access to the book on the Internet. Please answer this question: 'Which textbook do you think will be the reference text in 10 years?'"
Figure 6.1. Free Medical Books (by Carmen Rivera).
Do it yourself BSK's message is unequivocal: if a physician writes a book and wants it to be read by as many colleagues, students and patients as possible, he should not seek agreements with traditional publishing houses but simply produce the book independently. He reasons that all doctors today are experts in word processing and have become practiced layout designers. It takes them one mouse click and a few seconds to transform a book into a PDF document; with a second mouse click, the book is uploaded on a website. The making of medical textbooks is literally at the fingertips of writing physicians. Because medicine is not an endless subject, the medical community needs a small number of physicians - such as Hoffmann, Rockstroh, BSK, Preiser, Palomino, Leão, and Ritacco - to produce 100 textbooks, which would cover the most important topics of modern medicine. BSK accompanies his readers step by step through the process of how an idea becomes a book and how the books reach the readers. The individual stages of the Free Medical Information adventure are:
BSK has offered to make free medical textbooks visible by promoting them via some of his world-spanning communication channels:
Figure 6.2. Exploring new routes. Paris 2005, when BSK was writing Free Medical Information. Summary The principal messages of Free Medical Information are:
Second Edition The second edition of Free Medical Information is scheduled to be published by October 2007.
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