That's grand. I can already see the newspaper headlines "Philipp Lenssen Joins Cory Doctorow in the Creative Commons Hall of Fame".

No need for viral marketing, just give it away for free and you earn more than hiding behind your "copy"rights.

I was unable to download the book – was really looking forward to it.

Scott, what error message did you get, and what happened (and which browser/ OS)?

Greatest news ever!

Thanks Philipp.

thanks Philipp, I should update my post with this infor now!!

THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH!!!

This is great news for everyone who wanted to read the book but couldn't afford it – or who just wanted to spend their money on something else... ;-)

Out of interest, why did you decide against charging for the PDF?

i just read it really fast and it really is awesome! thanks again- and mmy name is in it!

Good question Tony, in fact I think you hit a nerve. :) OK, first of all, I tried hard to make the book "offline" readable. A blog is cool for online reading, a book is cool for offline reading, and this book was supposed to be on paper from the start. It's not a hands-on tutorial where you're sitting next to Google.com trying out this and that, at least not for the most part. It's a book to take on vacation, to read in the train, in an armchair and so on (at least that was my aim). And that's why I didn't publish a PDF right from the start, and that's why I don't think charging for the PDF would be right.

So what I think the PDF is for, is to browse the book to decide if you like it (it's also good to quote from it, or to convert it into different formats). Sure, if you don't have the money you can simply stick with the PDF. But from my own experience, having a fully available online version doesn't stop you from buying the book. In fact, when I look back I ended up buying quite a few books that I started to read online (in particular Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture", which I started to read online and then just had to buy it 'cause it was so interesting, and the same happened with "The American Undeground History of Education").

I mean, I don't know if all that is true for all people. But once you go ahead and jump into the "cold water" of Creative Commons, I think there's a lot of cool side-effects of having the full PDF online. For one thing, it just makes a much more interesting book site, a site I'd link to as a blogger because of the extra value to visitors. And if that gets more readers to the site who'd otherwise not have heard of the book, it's great. I didn't write the book to make money, or at least that's not the focus (working as a programmer in Germany makes more money, not that I'd mind to be proven wrong!), but of course I did write it hoping to find readers. And even when I don't sell more than say 100 books or so, I loved having done this and knowing many of you already got the book and enjoyed it.

Of course, there are also a few belief reasons why I want to push Creative Commons. I think we live in crazy times of more and more strong copyright restrictions, and anything you can do to balance that is cool. Not that I believe Creative Commons is that "crazy thing" that doesn't work out in terms of finding new readers – I think it's actually both friendly to readers & pragmatic for the author.

http://digg.com/links/55_Ways_to_Have_Fun_with_Google_-_FREE_PDF_BOOK_DOWNLOAD

Search Engines Web just Digged you – so what MAY Happen – might bring Sheer Joy or Sheer Agony...

But it HAD to be done, for the good of ... e-Society

" But once you go ahead and jump into the "cold water" of Creative Commons, I think there's a lot of cool side-effects of having the full PDF online"

Hear Hear!! :)-

Entering cold water is never great, but after 30 seconds you really enjoy the swim :)

> Search Engines Web just Digged you

Thanks, I wonder if diggers like it when you link straight to a 7 Meg PDF... :D

oh well its done .. anyhoot 7MB download should not take more then avg 3-4 min. ..no bigger.. hit the save button and move on to the next working tab..

By the way I really wonder why no one is participating in last week's contest to win a free (paper) version of the book...

what contest ?

:)

...yeah which one? did I miss anything!?

*cough*

PDFs: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

If you don't like PDF, convert it to any format you like and republish :)
An HTML is already on the way by Grimm, I heard!

Convert? D:

I just took it to my slightly-less-awesome computer and started printiing – it's about half way done. Still, you are an awesome person for releasing it free, and I should probably buy a copy of the book.

I'm skimming each page as it prints. For the evil thing, surely you meant Yahoo for the portal instead of Altavista. Altavista's freakin' TAME compared to htat.

Great! Now I can check it to see if you mentioned me! :)

Thank you Philipp for letting us read it for free. That's awesome.. of course the book will still be purchased by all my friends.

I bought the book a couple of weeks ago and I received it last week. I'm currently reading it and from what I have read so far, it's absolutely worth of any money spent on it. It's great fun.
I'll post a review on my site when I'm done reading.

Philipp,

Thanks for sharing....:)

Nice and brave move Philipp!

I am sure this decision will bring many many more incentives for the years to come than if you had kept it hidden! You are trully a model to follow for the whole blogosphere.

Your decision making skills are in top shape! Congrats ;-)

"A blog is cool for online reading, a book is cool for offline reading"
"So what I think the PDF is for, is to browse the book to decide if you like it "

you're right, I think it's hard to read an entire book on a screen,

Creative Commons needs your push ;) thanks for this book and for th PDF. a french blogger

Search-Engines-Web.com: it was digged already...

Philipp: I hope to find sometime to read this masterpiece. Thanks a lot for the sharing of it!

It's funny...this is much like the whole RIAA argument about piracy. The RIAA claims anyone that gets songs for free does it *instead of* buying the song, while the opposing argument is more people will get to hear the song, and many that do will end up buying it, so really it *increases* sales. It looks like you support the opposing argument from your explanation about the PDF :)

>>So what I think the PDF is for, is to browse the book to decide if you like it (it's also good to quote from it, or to convert it into different formats). Sure, if you don't have the money you can simply stick with the PDF. But from my own experience, having a fully available online version doesn't stop you from buying the book. In fact, when I look back I ended up buying quite a few books that I started to read online...

And here's the Word file now, too:
http://www.55fun.com/book-word.zip

"here's the Word file now"

Sure, after I spend hours fighting with my computer. :(

Wow! How many times has it been downloaded philipp??? it's got over 600 diggs soo far...

Wow, that it was on front page! So Diggers *do* like PDF links :D
Hooray for Search-engines-web :)

WOW, just read your "book". I want my time back!
Bunch of crap from one endt to the other.
If you ever sold this for money you should give them a double refund.

Only to tell you thank you so much for your effort. A blogger that from Madrid, Spain, reads you.