Posted by Luke in Okay so I have not weighed into the micro-debate surrounding the new Chris Anderson Book. You know why… it hasn’t really made me angry enough or pushed me into making comments. If you are interested there is an excellent analysis of the issue at Techdirt. This morning as I was navigating my RSS feeds I found an interesting article from Novelr.com. They had a free link to Scribd hosting the new Chris Andersen book for free… this is what I got:
Am I the only one seeing the irony here? Free! but only in the US. So it’s free 300 million people but for 5.7 Billion it’s unfree. This kind of thing has happened to those out of the States before and it continues to happen. I suppose I could coin the metaphor Free! (with restrictions).
I have been teaching the Long Tail as part of a university course for a while now and was thinking about using this in class too. Now, it’s probably going to cost me a small fortune to ship the book to Australia. I am not complaining I choose to live in the greatest country and state on earth, my choice and hey I love it here. For those in the US who are smart enough to use this offer by all means should. I think it’s odd that the statement the book is probably making (haven’t read it can’t comment) is being thwarted here by the very medium it’s proporting supports the production of free material! You know what… to hell with this I am just going to use a proxy server and download it for free anyway.
As a final comment the only thing I can say is what I learned from my students in Information Policy and Governance this semester. The largest consumer of Porn is China… now who has the great firewall? Hmm… no wonder piracy is so rampant with such silly restrictions as these. Now if you will excuse me, I must go download something illegal… just to clear my head.
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This is strange … yesterday it was free for all countries. Very disappointing, to say the least.
Odd, I too was able to access it yesterday (but not today). It also looks like todays Google Books version is limited too.
Although I’m reading a paper copy that I brought through the UK amazon site with free postage a few days ago.
Thanks Eli and John. I am thinking this was the publishers decision. It’s a shame because I am a huge fan of Chris Anderson’s work.