pdf’s of my Textbook and my Manifesto! UPDATE
UPDATE! Many people complained that the hi-res pdfs were too big. Then a new friend (Tom Geller) compressed them for me! Thanks Tom. the italics are distorted, but if you can live with that - these versions of the pdfs are Open Mesh - 38M and Digital City textbook - 26M - which is much more reasonable. The images too OK, so it should be fine for screen reading. And if you wanta fancy, hi-res version to print out - use the links below…….
In retrospect - I was so happy about finally getting pdfs at all. But obviously there’s no reason to have book quality resolution for on-screen reading. My bad. And thanks to Tom - again!
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So I finally found out how to trick Blurb’s BookSmart and get a pdf of my textbook. And here’s the pdf of my manifesto!
This is a happy day for me!
Now folks can read what I have to say without having to pay $60! And THEN if you love what I have to say - THEN you can buy a copy of the dead tree version (kudos to Cory Doctorow on that strategy!) It’s taken me THIS long to get here. How symbolic that the day I start to move my boxes into storage and REALLY move out - is the day my data moves out of it’s BookJail and into the cloud!
These pdf versions have a watermark in it and no covers - and I had to add one blank page to each book to normalize the ”two-up” Acrobat reader display and get the pagination right.
That means that the page numbers will be one off by one from the TOC.
But besides that - this ROCKS!
Everyone can now have a copy of my textbook - and a copy of my manifesto - for free!
Wow, that’s great! Thanks for sharing Marc
Interesting! Thanks for making this available.
I do think it would be nice to find a successor to the ‘dead tree strategy’. Doesn’t seem to make sense that we should depend on a scarce, material version of your work in order to financially reward you for it, so you can do cool stuff like provide for your family and whatnot.
Especially because these days reading an electronic version can be so much more convenient in the first place!
Right?
Thanks!
Thanks for this…and for putting on the Data Sharing Summit, and for all you’ve done for the open Web.