I wonder how having the PostScript drafts of John Ousterhout's reference
book ``Tcl and the Tk Toolkit'' freely available has affected sales for
Addison-Wesley? My guess (and it is just a guess) is that it either
hasn't effected them at all, or has even improved sales. Why? Because I
used the PostScript draft extensively before the book was published and I
still do. But I got the book as soon as I could because it was nice to
have the full index there (which wasn't in the draft) and to be able to
read it where I currently can't easily read an electronic version (on my
Mac for example :-) ). Brent Welch is doing likewise with his new book.
So maybe all this talk of copy protection and encryption, etc is a bit of
smoke screen if free distributing the information in one format helps the
sales of the same (or similar) information in another format.
Jon
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Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* It's not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important *