Lawrence Lessig has announced the release of the free Creative Commons licensed download version of his book Remix from Bloomsbury Academic on his blog.

Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from Bloomsbury (yep, the one from Harry Potter), led by renowned publisher Frances Pinter. I have written about Pinter and the Bloomsbury model before here. Basically their business model revolves around the same idea I wrote about yesterday in my post on Martijn Aslander: giving away free ebooks online will not harm print sales, it can even increase print sales. Although technically speaking, in the case of Remix, Bloomsbury Academic is working with a form of delayed Open Access. So in this case one should speak about an embargoed Open Access model (where the book was already available in print for half a year). Thus the question remains whether Bloomsbury Academic will continue with such a delayed Open Access business model (which according to many Open Access purists isn’t real Open Access), or whether they will present their print and free online releases at the same time from now on.

In any case, I am really glad Remix is now available as a free download and I can truly recommend the book! You can download a PDF of the book here.