Computer Publisher Goes Creative Commons

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.