Why We Created the Take Control Crash Course Series
We’re like you — we turn to the Web for answers first. But a lot of what’s on the Web is incomplete, unrelated, out of date, or flat-out wrong, whereas we work hard on accuracy and relevance in our books. We have to compete with all the content that’s already out there, but that’s hard if we’re not on the same playing field. So we’ve put the full text of each Crash Course on our Web site for search engines to index and for people to read […]
This may seem nuts, but people in the publishing industry also thought we were crazy back in 2003 when we refused to apply DRM to our books. What little copying there is hasn’t harmed our sales over the last 11 years, so with the Crash Courses, we’re going further and making them freely available on the Web. But, why would anyone buy such a book? Two reasons: first, we believe those who want offline access, better formatting, or more help than one chapter can provide will do the right thing and support our efforts, and those who needed only a quick answer wouldn’t have purchased anyway. Second, although the first chapter is easily read, we’ve slowed down navigating within the Web versions of books other than “Read Me First: A Take Control Crash Course,” so trying to read the entire book online would be unsatisfying.
