The Great Divide - Free E-Book

The Retro vs Metro website is a funny little teaser for what it turns out is a new book on American rural vs. urban demographics and how it affects politics. Well, the book is out, and the publishers have made it available for free download in pdf format. I wish more publishers would do this. Just as widespread mp3 sharing hasn't killed the music business, giving people a chance to read a book, before buying it (and most people still prefer printed pages to reading on a screen) is actually giving authors a great deal of success. The canonical examples are boing boing contributer Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig. But I think there's a big pent-up demand out there among people who might not be sure what kind of books they like, so they don't want to go and buy one out of the blue. Hell, the publishing industry has survived the existence of libraries for quite some time now, and they offer the material in the same format as the bookstores do.

I'll post a review of The Great Divide when I finish it. Pretty good so far.

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