I am today trying to write a paper for a forthcoming conference thinking about how to make an original contribution to the academic view on prototyping for wearable technology together with my lab team at Malmo University. While looking for references Tony had a nice surprise: he found his FREE ebook for SALE at a Chinese webshop. We called Xun, the only person in our lab that speaks Chinese currently, to find out someone is trying to sell the Open Software FREE pdf for money. You cannot imagine how flattering it actually is finding out your work being given some value this way. Best part? They haven’t even made the effort to translate it … so why paying for it, just go to softwear.cc and get it free of charge.

The Open Softwear Book for sale

I took this screenshot of the book just for you to see. It will probably disappear soon, not that we will try to stop them, but probably the fact they are selling a bunch of O’Reilly titles without permission might be forcing them down somehow (just check the second picture). We have seen a lot of ripoffs of the boards, but at least there someone had to go into a factory and manufacture something, here someone took a free book and tried to sell it for money. This is like picking up the apples from a tree in the public park and selling them two blocks further down the avenue.

some pdfs to Arduino related books

You know what Xun said? I don’t know why people are trying to sell these books this way … you can find all those books at some other pages anyway. I think Xun has been in Sweden for too long ;-) the whole piracy movement might have influenced him a bit.