Free Books Online

gaijin99 writes: "Kinda old, but Baen Books is letting any of their authors put up their books, for free, online. They are putting them up at the Baen Library No strings attached, downloadable in many formats. Apparently it got started when author Eric Flint said that online piracy didn't matter to book sales. Challenged to prove this, he got Baen to build the 'Free Online Library.' His position is that it will improve the sale of his books. Only six authors right now, but it looks good."

Re:Looks good now

<self-promotion>

Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer [theassayer.org], which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.

All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section [lightandmatter.com].

One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.

</self-promotion>

By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL [ipl.org] as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.

You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks [gnu.org]. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse [iuniverse.com], Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press [electricpress.com] do this.)

The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews

Reminds me of when Isaac Asimov...

...told his publisher it wouldn't make any difference to sales if the paperback and hardcover were published simultaneously, because they were bought by two disjoint sets of readers.

Though skeptical, they tried it, and surprise! it was so.

Unfortunately, I forget who the publisher was, though I suspect Doubleday. He wrote about it in one of his many essays.

Re:What about textbooks?

great idea. let's make the teachers do even more work. it's not enough that they have to handle 30 to 40 inattentive, disobedient, ritalin-addled children for six hours a day for less money than they could make working at mcdonalds. let's force them all to buy computers with their tiny income, and do more work when they get home.

are you in human resources?
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Online intellectual property piracy is a fallacy.

Napster has been responsible for most of my recent CD purchases. Tired of getting burned by CDs with two good songs and 10 terrible ones, I'd drifted away from modern music, but then Napster came along, and I got to preview all the music for a download. I ended up buying CDs of groups I never would have listened to otherwise, or had only heard one or two songs by them on the radio.

I'd chalked up the whole "Harry Potter" thing to the "Latest cool thingine" style craze that brought us Pokemon. Then I stumbled across the first three books in text form on Usenet. Yes, I read the first three for free, but I got addicted to books I NEVER would have read otherwise. I bought the fourth book, will be buying the rest of the series as it comes out (Unless it starts to suck) and will probably take my little sister to see the movie when it comes out.

Bottom line is, having books and music available online has caused me to buy MORE instead of less.

Heck, I even ended up buying the hard copy of an O'Reily book I already had in the Perl CD Bookshelf because I wanted a hard copy to mark up, dog ear and bookmark instead of having to fire up my browser every time I wanted to look up a code snippet.

And now I've read the first chapter to Black on Black and look forward to perusing it on my Palm during my next flight.

www.matthewmiller.net [matthewmiller.net]

A Great Example Is.....

.....Bruce Eckel at http://www.bruceeckel.com . All his books are free on the net. I downloaded "Thinking in Java 2" and started printing it out at work a chapter at a time, 2-up, double-sided on A4 and storing it in a ring-binder. After about 3 chapters, I was sick of the inconvenience, so went out and brought the book (a very worthwhile investment, I might add).

I suspect a LOT of people have done the same thing, and Bruce seems to be doing OK as a result. He makes some very good comments about it halfway down the page at http://www.bruceeckel.com/notes.html , worth reading.

I really don't see e-books taking off until we get those high resolution, paperback-sized flexible e-paper things. The reason books have lasted so long in their present form factor is convenience, which e-books currently don't have.

Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac

"If you had the equipment to burn the CDs and print the labels on them (if you were so concerned about appearing cool) you would be a damn fool to pay the money for the CD."

And yet, though I have the equipment to burn CDs and print labels on them, though I make heavy use of Napster, I continue to purchase CDs. Lots of CDs. I'm a bit insulted at being called a fool.

I want to give artists I enjoy money. The artist is alot more likely to create more music if I'm paying him. Purchasing a CD is a convient way to do this. (Sadly, musicians see very little of that money, but that's a different problem.) A CD also marks someone as a real fan.

I have a fairly technical group of friends. They all have easy access to CD burners and high quality printing. They make heavy use of Napster. They uniformly purchase lots of CDs.

Sure there are people who will happily leech this free content. But if these people don't feel ethically bound to pay up, why will they pay up if it isn't available for free legally? The risks of copyright infringement for an individual are negligable. Sure enough, some people have always built up libraries of copied tapes. You're not losing potential revenues if they weren't going to pay anyway.

Re:What about textbooks?

• great idea. let's make the teachers do even more work.

Yes, it is a great idea, but I guess you just don't have the imagination to see it.

First, nobody was talking about making anybody do anything. I feel certain that there are a lot of teachers who are passionate about their subjects and would love to contribute to such a product.

Second, if the Schools could get away with paying less for text books, they'd have more money for, yes you guessed it, more teachers or higher teacher salaries.

• less money than they could make working at mcdonalds.

While you might be able to find some odd case where a professional teacher makes less than someone in management at a McDonald's, by and large, the average teacher earns a great deal more than the average burger flipper. Heck, I'd take the low-end teaching job over the McDonald's managers job, which might, possibly be comparable in salary, any day of the week. Fast food restaurants work exempt employees long hours. The work is no fun and you have to ride heard on a bunch of inattentive, disobedient, ritalin-addled teenagers for 16 hours a day.

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More free lit onlnie

Legal: http://www.freesfonline.de/

Mostly Illegal: http://www.lib.ru/lat/ (yes, it's in russian. Some of their stuff is in English, tho. Look for authors you know, modulo transliteration (Ray Bradbury -> Rej Bredberi))

Also, Google turns up some great stuff, if you just put in the title of the book and the author: the search "Bullet In The Brain" Tobias Wolff turns up, in the first 20, http://www.wam.umd.edu/~shaner/stories/bullet.html

Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac

Bottom line is, having books and music available online has caused me to buy MORE instead of less.

Yes, but that's only because the existing technology/medium is not sufficient for your needs. Wanting to read a book at night without staring at the radiation from a CRT or handheld display and also the desire to keep a book in your bookshelf to impress the chicks; but those are the reasons you bought the book - not some moral obligation you felt to pay a usage fees.

Books will continue to hold this advantage for a while. The same is not true for CDs, etc. If you had the equipment to burn the CDs and print the labels on them (if you were so concerned about appearing cool) you would be a damn fool to pay the money for the CD.

It would be very foolish for the music industry to assume that people downloading music for free will always automatically want to buy it if it turns out to be good.

Thousands of Free Books! or Project Gutenberg

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Project Gutenberg [promo.net]. They have thousands of books available to download in .txt or .zip format. Most of the literature is Classical, but there are many excellent titles. Definitely worth your time to check out if you are into the eBook/eText thing.

Amigori
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Books are a great alternative to video games.