Apple's secrets revealed... free!

David Swan
Thursday, 05 August 2010 00:49

Your IT - Home IT

Apple's biggest asset has always been its marketing, and today, much to Microsoft's excitement, a book focussing on that very subject has been released online and for free.

 

The book, a newly digitized version of Guy Kawasaki's ground-breaking technology marketing book, The Macintosh Way, is available here.

OfficeDrop, a document scanning and digital filing system startup, provided the scanning services that turned an old copy of the book that was sitting on Guy's bookshelf into a text-searchable PDF. Pixability, a video marketing service, filmed the rebirth of the book surrounded by well-known Apple products since the book was written, including the original Macintosh 512k, a working Newton and the original Bondi iMac.

In The Macintosh Way, Guy Kawasaki outlines the principles of technology evangelism. Although the work remains a highly topical guerilla marketing book, the publisher let it go out of print. Guy recently regained the rights to his book, and wanted to digitally distribute it as a PDF for free to his Twitter followers.

"Information wants to be free, and now I can provide my very first book to everyone for free. OfficeDrop and Pixability were indispensable parts of this liberation effort," said Guy.

"We were happy to take on such an exciting project, and working with Guy was a lot of fun," said Healy Jones, VP of Marketing at OfficeDrop. "The Macintosh Way is an important book for many technology startups, and we were honored to turn it into a great eBook. People can also get the book for free on their iPad with OfficeDrop's new iPad Paper-to-Go app."

To document the entire destruction and resurrection of the book, Pixability took footage of the scanning process and edited a video to tell the story of The Macintosh Way.

The finished video follows Kawasaki's work throughout the conversion process and features the progression of Apple products over more than 20 years. The Vintage Mac Museum supplied most of the working Mac computers.

Pixability's CEO Bettina Hein comments, "We jumped at the opportunity to tell the story of rebirth in The Macintosh Way on video. It's a great story, and we think viewers will enjoy seeing the progression of Kawasaki's work from printed copy to an eBook."

Despite the fact that the book has been around for a long time, real value can be found in the process of bringing hard cover books to the online realm. There is little doubt that more and more digitization will be happening into the future, although perhaps next it should be Microsoft's turn.