Unleashing a torrent of words online

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 15 April 2008 06:21

Opinion and Analysis

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.