Lawrence Lessig's "The Future of Ideas" set free

[adinb]

"The Future of Ideas" is now free for download thanks to Lawrence Lessig and his publisher, Random House.

The only downside is that the download is limited to a PDF version; anyone up to the "format shifting"?

From Lawrence Lessig's Blog:

After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they've agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can download the book for free here, or above.

This means all four of my books are now CC licensed. Code (v1) was licensed under a BY-SA license; so too, Code (v2). And Free Culture and now The Future of Ideas are licensed under BY-NC licenses.

I am particularly glad that The Future of Ideas is now freely licensed. That book hit the stores 2 weeks after September 11. I'm glad it now has a chance to flow a bit more freely.

Thanks to Random House (and Basic Books, and Penguin) for being open to this experiment. I hope we'll have some useful data to report about its effect.

[cmbs]

I guess this proves that at least some authors have power to influence whether or not their books are released as ebooks. This guy's even got them release as FREE ebooks.

[yokos]

They just forgot to insert bookmarks/hyperlinked ToC.
Pdf file was created with QuarkXPress 4.x in 2001, got it last editings in december 2007 [CC title, copyright cross-outs].

Yes, it is compatible with iLiad.

[SpiderMatt]

Would anyone mind emailing this to me? Uncle Sam has blocked the download link on government computers I'm forced to use. :-(

mobileread (at) spidermatt.cjb.net

[tompe]

Has anybody managed to crop this file? I tried in Linux with pdfcrop but the result was not so good. Then I tried with pdfedit and got a file that looked perfect in xpdf and acroread but in my Gen3 it looks like the file I started with.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by tompe

Has anybody managed to crop this file? I tried in Linux with pdfcrop but the result was not so good. Then I tried with pdfedit and got a file that looked perfect in xpdf and acroread but in my Gen3 it looks like the file I started with.

Munseys has it in non-PDF format.

http://www.munseys.com/book/25597/The_Future_Of_Ideas

You can probably get it in a ready-to-read for your eBook reader there.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Munseys has it in non-PDF format.

http://www.munseys.com/book/25597/The_Future_Of_Ideas

You can probably get it in a ready-to-read for your eBook reader there.

Great catch.

dale

[tompe]

Perfect. It was very hard to find any other version and probably because the license was not Share Alike. I assume that Munsey must have gotten permission to distribute in other formats.

[mdhuang]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Munseys has it in non-PDF format.

http://www.munseys.com/book/25597/The_Future_Of_Ideas

You can probably get it in a ready-to-read for your eBook reader there.

Thanks for the link. Save me a couple hours since I just started to use Book Designer to convert the PDF file.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by tompe

Perfect. It was very hard to find any other version and probably because the license was not Share Alike. I assume that Munsey must have gotten permission to distribute in other formats.

I just read about creative commons licenses and I was wrong here. The license allows you to format shift and distribute it. Even if it had been no derivatives you had been allowed to format shift it.

[adinb]

Originally Posted by tompe

I just read about creative commons licenses and I was wrong here. The license allows you to format shift and distribute it. Even if it had been no derivatives you had been allowed to format shift it.

Good, that's what I thought that particular CC license allowed. Glad to see munsey had it for LRF already, though I haven't had the chance to check out the formatting yet.