A printing service, not a book

A printing service, not a book
18 Apr 2006

I stumbled across Kevin Kelly's Web site this morning, and found two full texts of books he had written. This may be old news to many, but it wasn't to me. Here's what he wrote about what he'd done:

"Out of Control was one of the first books to be available in its full text online. All 230,000 words are still available for free on the web here. (This fortuitous opportunity came about because my literary agent, John Brockman, was among the first to realize the value of online rights before the publishers did, so when he negotiated my book deal in 1990, we kept the online rights.) I mention this elsewhere, but its worth repeating_ You are free to print out the whole book; if that will help you read it, please do. But I can save you the hassle, time, and paper spent printing it out. Click here to get a printed version, nicely bound between color covers and mailed to your desk, all for about $16. Think of this as a printing service, not a book."

I think this is fascinating, and Kevin's absolutely right - the same idea can perhaps be applied to the music industry, which can be (let's face it) very good at packaging things in a way we want to handle and listen to them. All good food for thought.

P.S. OK I changed the associate link :-)