Yesterday, we alerted you to the free audio and text versions of Lawrence’s Lessig’s book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Today, we’re pointing you to a larger collection of high-quality books (45 in total) that you can download legally thanks to Lessig’s Creative Commons. The trove includes a good mix of genres. In fiction, you’ll find three works by sci-fi writer and blogger Cory Doctorow — Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Under non-fiction, you can freely access Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark (Harvard University Press), Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel (MIT Press), Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press), and Dan Gilmor’s We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, For the People. Finally, on the “how-to” side of things, you’ll stumble upon titles along the lines of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google. Not a bad collection of works, and certainly worth the price.
Most of these books are issued in traditional print ($$$) and free download versions, which raises the obvious question: does this make any business sense for publishers, let alone authors? Lawrence Lessig, who initiated the concept, asserts that it does, noting that more readers who access the free download copy will ultimately buy the print version than those who don’t. Or, put more simply: the converts will exceed cannibals, which results in a win-win-win-win situation. The readers win one way or another; the authors and publishers win; society wins; and so does the free flow of information. What more can you want?
You might also take a look at:
http://www.kroah.com/lkn/ Linux Kernel in a Nutshell
http://www.kroah.com/lkn/ Linux Device Drivers 3rd Ed
http://www.phptr.com/promotions/promotion.asp?promo=1484&redir=1&rl=1 Bruce Perens Open Source Series Page…24 Open Publication licensed Books
I am just about to publish a book about developing collaborative intelligence (‘Teaching an Anthill to Fetch’)under a CC licence – can anyone tell me how I could alert the CC community about this?
This really is the future.
I was an editor in the traditional publishing industry for years and after finally getting completely fed up with the constrictions placed upon me, started my own press using Print on Demand technology.
We’re giving our stuff out as PDFs as well, under Creative Commons. The numbers alone have shown me that this is as viable, if not an even *more* viable, method of publishing than the traditional channels.
Using this stuff I can take books from concept to delivered book in 2-3 weeks, and have stuff completely under creator control and in the public eye all over the internet immediately.
Creative Commons is *crucial* to this approach and the new horizons opened up by this are not only incredibly exciting, to my mind they signal massive, massive changes to the old way of doing things.
See what we’ve done here: http://www.ultraculture.org
Welcome to our Common Future. :)
IF I might suggest it, The Banjo Players Must Die should be worth a nod too!
[...] On a cultural note, The Spy in the Sandwich with extremely detailed notes on literary blogging in the Philippines. And obtain 45 Free Cutting-Edge Books … Courtesy of Creative Commons! [...]
[...] not free download. If you were hoping for a free book, you can click through to a number of free fiction and non-fiction e-books, which, while not life-changing, will no doubt give you food for [...]
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May I suggest my YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost, available in various e-formats, including podcasts? Soon I will also begin serialising and podcasting my new YA F/SF novel Corvus.
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Real estate I’ve not a clue how to handle it, nevertheless this can be useful