No Starch Press Turns Table on File Sharing

For Immediate Release

CONTACT:
Ariel Schwartz
nostarchpr@oreilly.com
415.863.9900 x301

No Starch Press Turns Table on File Sharing
Posts torrent versions of best-selling tech books with 11,000 combined
downloads in first week

San Francisco, CA-No Starch Press, publisher of geek books, is trying
something interesting with file-sharing sites.

Recognizing that the book business is changing and that books end up on
file-sharing sites within days of being released in electronic form, they
thought they'd take matters into their own hands. The result? No Starch
released their own "official pirate version" of two best-selling backlist
titles, Leander Kahney's The Cult of Mac and The Cult of iPod. News of the
release became a viral hit online, and there were over 11,000 downloads of
the books in the first week.

"I've always felt that these two books should have sold many more copies
than they actually have," said No Starch Press publisher Bill Pollock,
"but that they suffered from a lack of visibility. As four-color,
coffee-table books, they were never released electronically and never
appeared on torrent sites. So these two were good choices for this little
experiment."

Visibility online came swiftly. One of No Starch's editors had shared 2GB
of data from his home PC within hours of the initial upload. By the next
day, The Cult of Mac became the #1 book on the infamous torrent site, The
Pirate Bay. And a story about the experiment posted to TorrentFreak.com
reached the front page of popular social news site Digg.

The truth of the matter is that the battle to stop people from posting
copyrighted material to torrent sites is one that can't be won. Beside the
fact that No Starch Press sells PDFs without DRM (digital rights
management) protections, anything that can be viewed online can be
captured and pirated. Within days of its release, No Starch Press's
best-selling Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition, was scraped
from an e-book site and posted to multiple file-sharing networks.

Of course, part of the reason for No Starch releasing these titles on P2P
sites is political. As major organizations and ISPs work to shut down file
sharing, No Starch aims to remind them that P2P has valid uses as
well-even for traditional content providers. "File sharing itself, or P2P,
is not a crime," said Pollock. "It can be a great way for willing artists
to share their work. That's not to say that stealing copyrighted material
is not a crime, and our actions are not in any way meant to endorse it."

"If this experiment works, we'll try more titles," Pollock said. "And even
if it doesn't work, we may try more titles, if only to beat pirates at
their own game."
For more information please email nostarchpr@oreilly.com.

About No Starch Press
Founded in 1994, No Starch Press is one of the few remaining independent
computer book publishers. We publish the finest in geek
entertainment-unique books on technology, with a focus on Open Source,
security, hacking, programming, alternative operating systems, and LEGO.
Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books
tackle topics that people care about. See www.nostarch.com for more
information and our complete online catalog. (And most No Starch Press
books use RepKover, a lay-flat binding that won't snap shut.)

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