Author Ross Anderson has convinced his publisher (Wiley) to let him make his book, Security Engineering, available for free online. I’ll let his reasons speak for themselves:
My goal in making the book freely available is twofold. First, I want to reach the widest possible audience, especially among poor students. Second, I am a pragmatic libertarian on free culture and free software issues; I think that many publishers (especially of music and software) are too defensive of copyright. I don’t expect to lose money by making this book available for free: more people will read it, and those of you who find it useful will hopefully buy a copy. After all, a proper book is half the size and weight of 300-odd sheets of laser-printed paper in a ring binder. (My colleague David MacKay found that putting his book on coding theory online actually helped its sales. Book publishers are getting the message faster than the music or software folks.)
If more authors and publishers felt this way the world would be a better place. If I’m going to read an interesting book I’m going to buy it and carry it around in dead-tree format but for searching quickly for something that “I know I’ve read somewhere” it’s hard to beat a digital format.
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