The innovative guys over at Quirk, have put together what seems to be a world first, an eMarketing textbook, which is offered online for free - but also available in stores in print.
The book, entitled ‘eMarketing - The Essential Guide to Online Marketing’ is targeted mainly at universities (and businesses). Quirk is supporting the Creative Commons licensing pogram.
Rob Stokes, CEO of Quirk eMarketing and author of the book says, “We have been working with various tertiary institutions, including University of Cape Town (UCT), AAA School of Advertising and the Red and Yellow School for the past nine years. It became clear that there was not enough source material for lecturers and students who wanted to learn more about online marketing. And, what was available was based purely on American case studies which don’t always make sense in the other markets. The thing I am most excited about is that this book is freely available for download. It’s the distillation of all of Quirk’s knowledge and to be able to offer it to all without any limitations is a privilege.
To add to the innovation, Google South Africa is also supporting it!
Stafford Masie, country manager of Google South Africa was very impressed, saying eMarketing – the Essential Guide is “the perfect starting point for anyone entering the world of online marketing.” Google has also included a $15 Google Adwords voucher in every printed book to give people who have never tried the service an easy way to do so.
I really think that this is a phenomenal effort to try and increase the level of education in schools and universities about the area of online marketing - it would be great if this book could lead to more programs and curriculums being created in parts of the world where it’s especially expensive to obtain this type of material for coursework. The future of the Internet is “Free!” - you heard it here first 
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Comments On This Post
July 23, 2008 at 11:58 am
Wow, great work from the guys at Quirk. I have been looking for a guide like this.
>The future of the Internet is “Free!” - you heard it here first
Not quite true IMO this is just another use of the Freemium business model. Although it is to many peoples’ advantage. But they are still selling the bound books and their other services.
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/the_freemium_...
July 23, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I am very excited as well, I won a copy. I am glad to see that a company as prominent as Quirk is going the Open Education route.
July 25, 2008 at 6:56 am
Could not believe my eyes.. Downloaded it.. busy reading it.. will be buying a copy in the coming weeks.. kinda grateful too that Quirk doesn’t really have a presence in Durban.. these guys are just too brilliant..
July 26, 2008 at 1:22 am
Wow this is great! You are absolutely correct - there are very few formal classes on the subject and this is a great way to educate the college masses. We love that South Africa is involved too!
July 26, 2008 at 9:35 am
Thanks for sharing the info: im out to read the book but i beieve that there is so much information out there on online marketing that frequently all these free e -books are just but repetitious!
July 26, 2008 at 11:53 am
Thanks for the link. Amazingly there are many blogs and sites but we don’t have any official text book. I am happy to have the link.
July 27, 2008 at 9:38 am
Do you think that we need such stuff in presence of big blogs and sites? I don’t think so an it doesn’t make any sense for me to have a license or not.
July 31, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Do we have other cool products by Quirk? I am kinda new in books or ebooks. I shall be reading the book after downlaoding but am confused a bit.
August 1, 2008 at 6:03 am
Thanks for the very kind words. We too are very excited and hearing feedback like this makes the hard work well worth it. I will be passing these words onto the team.
@Passive Harry - Currently ‘eMarketing’ is the only book we have written but there are plans to do others and we are already updating the current book. If you looking for some eMarketing resources have a look at http://www.quirk.biz/resources/ there quite a lot of bits and bobs which you may find useful.
Tim
August 4, 2008 at 9:33 am
just a thought..
does the creative commons license enable me to now develop a course around emarketing and sell the course to education establishments.. or even lecture on the subject myself?
August 4, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Thanks for sharing this information. I always wonder what happened to my “emarketing” education when I was in school. There was nothing in the text books that helped prepare me for the Internet marketing world.
can’t wait to start reading …
August 5, 2008 at 8:46 am
@arthurficial, thats an interesting question. The Creative Commons licence is an attribution, non-commercial, Share and share alike licence.
This means that anybody can take this content, use it, modify it provided 1) they attribute it to Quirk eMarketing 2) they retain the same licence on the work 3) don’t sell the rewritten work for profit.
So, yes, you could print the textbook, put together a course (which is effectively your IP) and prescribe our textbook. What you can’t do is print out the book and sell it for profit etc…. the whole intention here is that people do exactly what you asking about without many of the existing barriers to entry. There is almost no practical eMarketing textbooks and we want as many people as possible to learn from it.
Ps: If you do manage to sell in this lecture please register as an educator and we will supply you with full lecture slides… just to make it even easier
http://www.quirk.biz/emarketingtextbook/educator
August 20, 2008 at 8:03 am
[...] "I really think that this is a phenomenal effort to try and increase the level of education in schools and universities about the area of online marketing." Vinny Lingham [...]
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August 27, 2008 at 9:44 am
Nice post, thank you for sharing!
October 27, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Thanks for sharing the info: im out to read the book but i beieve that there is so much information out there on online marketing that frequently all these free e -books are just but repetitious!
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