Cult of Mac and Cult of iPodare now available for free download off of BitTorrent. The publisher No Starch Press calls it an “experiment”, to see what kind of reaction they get and if they can measure it.
“I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away,” writes Pollock on the No Starch blog. “But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.”
I have checked out the Cult of Mac book, from the library and really enjoyed it. I haven’t flipped though the iPod book yet. Both books are at least a couple of years old.
So go download them if you want them! I do hope someone will share the results of their little experiment here. You can click through to wired.com’s site to get the torrent links.
Today, I saw where PBS’s Independent Lens series has picked up Helvetica. This information is so far in advance that it’s more like torture than news. They won’t know the date of its showing until July.
Is that a headline of the future? The rumor mill has cranked out enough “what ifs” to come full circle. Ever since Steve jobs announced that no one reads anymore and that publishing is a dead-end market, people have have been picking at him.
But the NY Times’ blog has a post today, not double guessing, but quadruple guessing Jobs and Apple’s plans and wonder if they plan to reinvent book reading the way they reinvented the way people listen to music.
