Download Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod for free

The publisher and authors of the Cult of Mac and the Cult of iPod books on the Apple sub-culture, have taken the bold step of releasing electronic versions of the two books for free. They have chosen none other than the controversial Swedish Bittorrent hub, The Pirate Bay (torrent 1, torrent 2), as the launching point of the two books into the widely popular peer to peer file sharing network.

The electronic versions of both books are not crippled in any way and are available in full colour and in high resolution - I know, as I have downloaded both copies to take a look. Both books are glossy coffee table books and I can understand how distributing these books electronically are unlikely to cannibalise the real world sales of the books as coffee table books by their nature, need to be in printed format to be enjoyed. Nevertheless, this does not take away from the boldness of this move in a world where debates around digital rights management (DRM) of electronic assets are still raging.

In the words of Bill Pollock from No Starch Press :

But there’s a political issue here as well. I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage. Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us. After all, we were the first publishers in the United States to come out publicly against the DMCA. Time to put our money where our mouth is, as they say.

I think this is a fantastic experiment and really demonstrates the progressive mindset of both No Starch Press and Wired magazine to embrace technology rather than to fight it. However, this is fine until someone upgrades those ever increasing digital photo frames to allow the viewing of PDF files, perhaps using an Apple iPhone styled multi-touch interface where you can physically flip electronic pages in a book. That could be an issue for releasing coffee table books for free as the consumption such assets will be made that much easier with large touch screen displays that may start to occupy the living room. For now, the only place for coffee table books in the living room is physically on the coffee table.