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Our Blogs Open Sauce Unleashing a torrent of words online
Our Blogs Open Sauce Unleashing a torrent of words online | Unleashing a torrent of words online |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 15 April 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 There is also a political angle to using this method of distributing books. Pollock says that even as big corporations and internet service providers work to shut down file-sharing sites, they need to be reminded that peer-to-peer has valid uses for traditional content providers. "File sharing itself, or P2P, is not a crime," says Pollock. "It can be a great way for willing artists to share their work. That's not to say that stealing copyrighted material is not a crime, and our actions are not in any way meant to endorse it. "If this experiment works, we'll try more titles. And even if it doesn't work, we may try more titles, if only to beat the pirates at their own game." No Starch Press is 14 years old and is one of the few remaining independent computer book publishers. Pollock hasn't decided what book he will release next. "We don't know yet. We're going to see what happens with this one. We may release more titles as torrents or we may not release any more." There are no strings attached to the downloads he offers. "The torrents themselves do not solicit donations though we've considered trying to come up with a sort of shareware solution for book distribution. We encourage people to buy the printed book if they like what they see. "Ultimately, this is both a political and business decision for us and in using bittorrent to promote our books and our company in this way, our hope is that we'll increase our visibility and our sales even beyond their current levels." Pollock says he does not know of other publishers taking this route. "We've released several books under free licenses for years, (and) even included one with the Debian Linux distribution. We've used FDL, CC, DSL licence, and others. We'll continue to release books under free licenses as authors request that we do so, including our forthcoming How Wikipedia Works. Other publishers have released books under free licenses as well," he says. Those who download the books have left their own comments on the site; Pollock likes one simple comment that says 'very nice, thank you.' "The thank you part, especially," he says.
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