Simplifying the Fine Print

Last week there was a book that shot to the Number One spot on Amazon's best sellers, but only for that one day. It was Machine of Death, written by a collection of many people and edited by Ryan North (creator of Dinosaur Comics) and some other funny guys. It's about a machine that predicts the way you will die. It looks pretty interesting.

Anyway, I was looking around on their website and saw that they are offering a PDF version of the book for FREE. No joke. You can download your own free copy of the book here. They explain their decision to do so this way:

Please find below the entirety of Machine of Death as a free, downloadable PDF.
Why are we doing this? Aren’t we worried about hurting our book sales?
In a word: no. You have proven time and again that you are willing to pay for content that you find valuable. You have shown that you are driven to share material that you fall in love with. And we are committed to ensuring that you can experience our work whether you can afford to buy a book or not; whether you live in a country that Amazon ships to or not; whether you have space in your life for a stack of paper or not.

I think this is awesome. I'm all about collaboration and sharing. I was looking at their website and the things these guys are doing are pretty cool. For instance, this book is not copyrighted, but are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. This means you are free to share this work in anyway you want (email, photocopy, print out, etc.) just as long as you attribute the work to the author, the manuscript remains unbroken, and it's used for non-commercial purposes.

You know how I was able to figure that out?

Because this is what their license agreement looks like:

Isn't that so refreshing? It's so simple, so clean. You can see it for yourself here.

(I'm letting that screen shot count as my Paint artwork of the day. I copied and pasted into Paint, after all.)