I’m grateful to Apress for its willingness to publish books under open licenses. See other examples of Apress books freely available online: http://www.diveintopython.org/ and http://djangobook.com/ For many computer books such as mine, it makes a ton of sense for open it all up. If the book is any good (which, of course, I do believe it is), then serious readers will want to buy a print version. I myself buy quite a few book which I could already access digitally. But there is nothing like being able to curl up with a book to learn a subject.

At the same time, once you want to work with the examples in the book, there’s nothing like having it online. Moreover, since my book is about a fast changing subject, I would like to have a fast changing medium to track it. Putting the book out in digital form for remixing, I hope, will help.

Finally, I hope that the book will prove useful enough to lots of people that the content will worked into the rest of the Web. What else can an author of a book on mashups hope for — in addition to be some royalties from his book? :-)

I’ve heard dozens of people of that persuasion assert that Creative Commons, GPL, etc, are the result of an intellectual fad and will fade away as soon as their innate anti-profitability is fully realized.

They’re really missing the point.