diff --git a/src/INSTALL b/src/INSTALL
index ed005e6c..b1d8f8fe 100644
--- a/src/INSTALL
+++ b/src/INSTALL
@@ -11,10 +11,9 @@ A more complete version of this document can be found at http://www.recoll.org
 
 Installing Recoll
 
-   There are currently no binary packages, so you will need to build Recoll
-   from source before installing it.
+  Building from source
 
-  Prerequisites
+    Prerequisites
 
    At the very least, you will need to download and install the xapian core
    package (I am currently using xapian version 0.8.5), and the qt runtime
@@ -35,7 +34,7 @@ Installing Recoll
      * PDF files: pdftotext is part of the Xpdf package.
      * Postscript files: pstotext.
 
-  Building
+    Building
 
    Recoll has been built on Linux (redhat7.3, mandriva 2005), FreeBSD and
    Solaris 8. If you build on another system, I would very much welcome
@@ -58,6 +57,19 @@ Installing Recoll
    to fix the "-L/usr/local/lib -lxapian -liconv" piece, depending on where
    your libs are installed. Then run 'qmake recoll.pro' in there.
 
+  Using binary packages
+
+   The binary versions are just compressed tar files of a build tree, where
+   only the useful parts were kept (executables and sample configuration.
+
+   The executable binary files are built with a static link to libxapian and
+   libiconv, to make installation easier (no dependencies). However, this
+   also means that you can't change the versions of xapian and iconv which
+   are used.
+
+   After having untarred the file, you can proceed with installation as if
+   you had built the package from source.
+
   Installation
 
    Execute installrecoll targetdir, in the root of the source tree. This