Back in December, David Pogue posted The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality. Go ahead and read it...I'll wait.

He ran this exercise at the FOSE Conference in Washington, DC, in April. I find the groups' response (as a whole) more fascinating than my own. It's interesting to see where people draw the line between stealing, borrowing, and "it's on the Internet, so it must be free".

So last Thursday, he posted another article about copyright. (Go ahead...I'll still be here ;-)). And again, it's polarizing. And it's fascinating to see the reactions. For example, because he mentioned that he has a mortgage and college to pay for, some of the comments are along the lines of "But you're David Pogue! You must have enough money to pay for that already!" (I don't know about Mr. Pogue, but I find that my mortgage company much prefers a check instead of a link to my website.)

Someone else compared electronic files to borrowing a book from someone. But here's the thing some folks aren't quite getting: if you borrow a book from me, I no longer have it. You do. If I give you a copy of an ebook, we both have copies, but the author only got paid for the one I bought.

The reason this caught my eye (more than usual, anyway) is because I'm getting ready to release the Author-it 5.0 training materials. I provide a password-protected ebook, and I've been toying with the idea of releasing individual chapters for those folks who only need to know everything about one specific concept. But releasing password-protected ebooks on a chapter-by-chapter basis requires a lot more effort on my part, and so I was thinking about releasing PDFs instead.

So I'm curious. If you could purchase a PDF that included information on a concept you were interested in (not necessarily mine; I'm just speaking in general*), would you? And after you purchased it, would you share it with your co-workers? With others? Would you make it available on a website? Would you share the link to the original PDF? And if you really liked what you saw, would you then purchase the entire book?

(*For example, would you purchase a PDF that told you how to structure a wiki? Produce custom reports from a specific piece of software? In other words, the PDFs would be complete for what they covered, but they wouldn't include anything else like installing the wiki, setting up permissions on a wiki, customizing the software itself, and so on.)