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 Why spend hundreds of dollars on printed books which are soon out-of-date when you can have continually updated online books for nothing!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: