San Fransisco-based No Starch Press has started experimenting with giving away their books for free on BitTorrent via The Pirate Bay.
San Fransisco-based book publisher No Starch Press, which proclaims to publish only the “finest in geek entertainment,” has announced in a new blog posting that it’s “giving books away” for free on BitTorrent.
Today they have seeded two of the popular titles that they publish, “Cult of Mac” (torrent) and “Cult of iPod” (torrent), both by Leander Kahney of Wired.com. No Starch Press founder William Pollock has posted about why he’s testing out this unique form of book distribution.
He writes:
We’ll be watching to see if making the electronic versions of these books available for free has any effect whatsoever on book sales. And if there is some noticeable effect whether it’s a positive one. I hope so because I think P2P can be a very good and powerful too.
It’s an interesting turn of events for Kahney who freely admits that he has previously tried to stop the “appearance of electronic versions of our titles on torrent sites,” an experience he refers to as “agonizing” one. It is from this experience that he has come to believe that perhaps it can be utilized to his advantage by “increasing the visibility our titles in a crowded market.”
“I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away,” Kahney continues. “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.
Kahney is now of the opinion that P2P and file-sharing networks like BitTorrent can be used to a content producers advantage by allowing them to distribute content to places otherwise inaccessible. No Starch Press may be unable to advertise or sell a title like “Cult of Mac” for instance in an isolated or distant location like Guam for example, but by using the power of BitTorrent to make the book available there it may lead readers to seek out other titles by the publisher or to simply mention it to friends or family. In the end No Starch Press gets free exposure like even this story itself. It also gets a chance to create a customer base in new locations with little if any cost to itself.
It’ll be an interesting experiment to observe, but as Kahney points out, “Stay tuned,” and in the meantime “please share.”
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