Computer Publisher Goes Creative Commons

June 1, 2006 By Geoff Duncan

Computer publisher In Pictures has released 22 books free to the public under Creative Commons licenses.

Computer book publisher In Pictures has released 22 books in its In Pictures series for free download through August 1, 2006, under Creative Commons licenses. The ebooks are not protected by DRM: under the terms of the licenses, users can share and distribute the ebooks for free, so long as they don’t alter them or charge for distribution.

“We could have spent a hundred thousand dollars on advertising thatmost people would ignore,” said In Pictures creator Chris Charuhas. “Butinstead we decided to give away a hundred thousand dollars worth of books.When people try them, they like them, then they spread the word.”

The 22 In Pictures titles cover a fair range of current computer technologies and applications, including Windows XP, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the Office 2003 suite, the MS Office alternative OpenOffice.org, Photoshop, Fireworks, DreamWeaves, FrontPage, HTML & CSS, as well as MySQL, Perl, and PHP.

Screen-quality version are available for free download through August 1, 2006; print-quality versions are available for $3.95 apiece and bound versions are priced at $14.95. After August 1, In Pictures plans to feature a free “book of the month” as a free download.

Showing 3 comments

Karl Viklund at 2:31am 2nd June 2006 Good. I like it. Creative Commons licenses is the way to go. More and more people and companies starting to use the license.
Ian Bell and Dan Gaul at 2:12pm 1st June 2006 Wow this is a bold step, and one we can all apreciate. I know Google was going to index a lot of books online, were they going to make the books viewable as well for free? Sorry if I sound dumb.
Matt at 11:52am 1st June 2006 If you go to their site, they have Access, Excel, Power Point, Word, and Publisher 2003. All of which are a great learning tool. Not bad, especially for free.