The Hacker Crackdown
Bruce Sterling’s 1992 book The Hacker Crackdown is still available free on the Web. Sterling had the uncommonly neat idea of reserving the digital rights to his book and putting out a free copy. As Bruce says…
“The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown, and commercially the book has done well. On the other hand, I didn’t write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don’t have any money—(no, not even enough for the sixdollar Hacker Crackdown paperback, with its attractive bright-red cover and useful index). That’s a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb to the temptation to do things they shouldn’t, such as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back. *8-)”