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March 20, 2008

internet

The Cult of Mac invades pirate territory

Posted Mar. 20, ’08, 1:35 PM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Internet

The Cult of Mac - Pirate BayNo Starch Press and Wired news editor Leander Kahney have released two of his books, The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod, on one of the largest public BitTorrent trackers in the world, The Pirate Bay.

In an era where movie houses, music labels, and book publishers are spewing fire at file-sharing networks, No Starch Press decided to express solidarity with the technology and hopes to benefit from this move.

Bill Pollock of No Starch Press said, “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.”

We think we know where they got this inspiration from—when Paulo Coelho made the Russian translation of his best-selling novel, The Alchemist, available via BitTorrent, sales of physical copies of the book jumped from 1,000 to over 1,000,000 per year in Russia.

This is particularly good news for yours truly, because I’ve been searching, in vain, for these books in Indian bookstores for the past several months. Since I prefer to read from an actual book, as opposed to a computer screen, I still might buy them if I ever chance upon them, but it’s difficult to resist the enticing price of free.

Leander Kahney has also recently released Inside Steve’s Brain, which takes a detour from the usual biographies to give us a glimpse inside the mind of the demigod of the 21st century and spearhead of the digital revolution.

You can download both The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod with the help of any of the several freely available BitTorrent clients such as Transmission or Azureus.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this interesting development. Will you purchase the books now that a digital copy is available for free? Chime in with your opinion in the comment strings.

[Via TorrentFreak]


1 Comments

wesg Author Profile Page said:

The Cult of Mac was completely worth it. If anyone was unsure if I was a Mac fanboy before, just seeing that shaved head on the coffee table certainly answers the question.

March 20, 2008 3:05 PM

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