Free book! Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age

John Biggs of Techcrunch and Crunchgear has made his first book, Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age available as a free download. Biggs asks only that you email him or tweet him at @johnbiggs to let him know you grabbed a copy: "It took me a two years to write this and it took Apress many resources to publish it. Now, however, it's run its natural life and I'd like to perform this experiment to see how many copies will circulate in order to assess the feasibility of releasing books like this in the future."

• [Rob Beschizza]

  He might mean that it’s not FREE free, just free beer.

• [gaspergou]

  Sounds like he couldn’t find a real publisher.

  • [Anonymous]

    *smh* You couldn’t read one paragraph? The entire article is one paragraph long and you couldn’t even read that? Clearly a book isn’t for you, my friend.

• [Ingmar]

  So it’s actual not a free download… Just sayin’.

  • [Anonymous]

    I don’t understand this comment. How is it not free if you don’t have to pay for it?

    • [Ingmar]

      Money is not the only currency there is; a free download is out there on the web somewhere for the taking. “Mail me and I send you a copy” is, well, marketing. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but I’ll pass anyway.

  • [chgoliz]

    The miniscule requirement to email him does not negate the free download.

• [Rob Beschizza]

  It was published by Apress (an imprint of Springer), as you would know if you’d actually read this single-paragraph post before commenting.

• [Anonymous]

  Thanks for the posting. It must be hard for an author to set his work free despite the fact that if it does become a big hit again by some odd circumstance he will still be able to cash in. I love eBooks especially DRM and surveillance free ePubs but for books that I really love the physical version is still needed. Reading free ePubs whether from the library or those few available with the author’s blessing exposes me to subjects I wouldn’t have investigated previously.

• [flytch]

  good book and good info… nothing I didn’t know but I’d give it to my dad should he ever brake down and get a computer…

  he missed my favorite thing I tell everyone… viagra… if I sell you sugar pills then it’s up to you to sue me for your loss… but IF I sold you the real pill it I would be in trouble with the federal government since it is illegal for me to sell them without a prescription… think about it when you order on line!

  sooooo Thank you John :) it read very well!
  Timothy…

• [CountZero]

  I don’t understand Ingmar’s comment. A tweet costs nothing; zip, zero, zilch, nada. Or is your life so full to bursting that even the smallest amount of time expended tweeting the author must be costed and accounted for? So how much did it cost to post on here?
  I’ve just downloaded it into iBooks, and I’ll be dropping the author a tweet to thank him. Cost? £0