Blog

IT NEWS     Sustainability    Get JOB ALERTS that match your skills
Technology news and Jobs arrow Our Blogs arrow Open Sauce - A GNU perspective arrow Unleashing a torrent of words online
Unleashing a torrent of words online PDF E-mail
User Rating: / 0
PoorBest 
by Sam Varghese   
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Geek book publisher No Starch Press is experimenting with offering books online and, so far, has ended up seeing a huge surge in interest.

Two books about the Mac - Leander Kahney's The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod - were put online and more than 11,000 downloads were noticed in the first two weeks, publisher Bill Pollock says.

Cult of Mac was released in hardcover in November 2004 and in paperback two years later. Cult of iPod was released in November 2005.

Pollock says that he decided to release the books on file-sharing sites after recognising that the book business is changing and that books invariably end up on such sites soon after being released in digital form.

"I've always felt that these two books should have sold many more copies than they actually have but that they suffered from a lack of visibility," he says. "As four-colour, coffee-table books, they were never released electronically and never appeared on torrent sites. So these two were good choices for this little experiment."

In taking this route, Pollock has accepted that the battle to stop people from posting copyrighted material to torrent sites is one that cannot be won. The book Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (2nd edition), a best-seller for the publisher, was scraped from an e-book site and posted to many file-sharing networks within days of its release.


 
< Next story in category   Previous story in the category >
  •   *  
  • Search
  • AdvSeach
  • Login
  • Events
  • FreeStuff
Subscribe to our free e-newsletter
First name:
Last name:
Your email address:
Your role:
Your industry:
Australian state:
Country:
Enter the security code shown:
mandatory
Contact , Register , Advertise with iTWire , Links , About iTWire , Feedback , Post your jobs , Events , iTWire site map , Start Blogging , MyBlogLog page
Industry Releases , Submit your release now