Free Books Online 172
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:What about textbooks? (Score:1)
Anyone else think this might be useful?
Yes! All the people who wrote the books listed there!
Unfortunately, I think K-12 may be the hardest place to start making free-information inroads into textbooks. The politics you have to go through in most states to get a K-12 book approved is just horrendous.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:Looks good now (Score:1)
Re:Alles in Ordnung?! (Score:1)
Re:Related technology... (Score:1)
Re:Alles in Ordnung?! (Score:1)
2. The Soviet Union, not Russia, is associated with communism. Russia has never been a communist country.
Re:What about textbooks? (Score:1)
If schools save money on textbooks, they wont spend that money on teachers - they'll cut budgets or spend it elsewhere instead.
Schools permanently want more money; so do teachers. If the school gets more money, it would be foolish to assume the teachers will see any of it, let alone all of it.
~Cederic
Re:Alles in Ordnung?! (Score:1)
True, and in this case all the totalitarian phrases were in English. The German phrase was not totalitarian (is everything all right?), but was used to show what the author thought of the other phrases by association.
> The Soviet Union, not Russia, is associated
> with communism
But the language was Russian, which is why Russian-like phrases are effective in creating an association with totalitarian communism.
Re:Of course, context is everything... (Score:2)
Rich
hey, Katz! (Score:2)
BugBear
Yet more free online books (math) (Score:1)
Re:Reminds me of when Isaac Asimov... (Score:2)
I on the other hand already have over a thousand books and don't need them to be bigger. I prefer small and portable over large and clunky.
I do dislike how they sell the books, with the hardcovers being the ones the author makes money off of. I'd much rather buy the paperback that I find convenient and tip the author an extra buck or two.
Many authors are offended if people wait for the paperbacks, but excuse me, it's not worth the extra $20 for a bigger, less useful book, just to make a little more money for them.
Re:Content versus medium (Score:2)
But Baen's webscription is run by the publisher. They supply the editors, match the authors with the cover artists, help market things, and take care of the financial side. That'll always be useful. The only difference is that they won't be absolutely required so they'll have to compete for the market.
And even the paper pushers won't go out of business. It's just that instead of paying the paper tax to be able to read, I'll buy the book online and buy a poster to go on the walls. They'll adapt and survive. Some at any rate.
It'll be quite a while before paper isn't the best for some things. (Even books, in many settings.)
Re:The effect on other media (Score:1)
I could be facetious and say 'none', since my speakers stay off these days, but I do have a few mp3s, and they're mostly live/rare/unreleased, so no 'real' copies. I've bought cds for which I'd downloaded songs; mainly stuff I was going to get anyway and wiped for disk space once I had the albums.
As for how the try-all-then-buy would work in my case, the answer is "very badly". Before I buy something readily available in full, for free, I'd have to be getting added value for money in terms of useability/nicer format/reward a deserving creator.
Frex, I doubt I'll buy a Doonesbury collection while they keep the entire archive online (and the library has the cd version) no matter how much I enjoy Duke strips, and the only thing Baen's samples have ever done is convince me not to get X's latest, though I like how they post 3 chapters, not just one. Otoh, I ordered Harbaugh's character dictionary based on the quality of his site [zhongwen.com], but it took me 2 years, and was because I wanted to read entries at leisure and Mozilla was buggy on the frames.
I appreciate people putting their whole works online, but I think that from a sales point, going beyond moderate samples (say, short stories/essays in full, shopping link for novels/collections) is detrimental. Few authors/artists are good enough to sustain my interest when it comes to turning freebies into own-copies, and given the choice between buying hardcopy of someone's useful textbook and spending that money on Feynman books, Tuva or Bust wins. I also think that most people are paying out of guilt or on principle.
That said, given the choice between a more costly physical copy (of reasonable quality and price) and a cheap/er online copy from a favourite (and worthy) author (Pratchett or Hambly, say), I'll take the tactile (not to mention archival) version. And I'd be really happy if I could buy print-on-demand facsimiles of oop/obscure works.
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:2)
I actually don't want liner notes, or cover art. I still want to support the artist, but CDs are such a pain. I immediately rip (to mp3) any that I do get and toss them into a box where I leave them.
So I don't buy CDs, or rather, I do, but want to stop. That's why the idea of tipping the artist directly is so great. I can pay 1/4 of what I would have for the CD and the artist gets 4 times as much (easily). So if I spend the same ammount I can get four times as much music, and the RIAA doesn't get a dime.
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:2)
Go to fairtunes.org and tip the author. If you want to tip the full cover price, I'm sure they'd love it, but if you want to tip maybe a 1/4 or so (because all you're paying for is the words) then that's fine too.
If the author isn't listed, then tell some friends because I think they only tip once the ammount is over $50 or so.
That's a much better way than buy paper you don't want, supporting a system that you don't need.
Re:Piracy shouldn't be a problem (Score:1)
would you like help? (Score:1)
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
Re:The effect on other media (Score:1)
thank you
About online comics... (Score:1)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ffil
*boggle* (Score:2)
what a concept. This may revolutionize my book-buying tendencies. I wonder if BookPeople has a Baen publishing section (wise-ass reply, "look in sci-fi/fantasy")
I'm impressed beyond words. This is great. After the gloom and doom of the MPAA and RIAA repeating their tired arguments from the betamax time-shifting trials 20 years later, it's wonderful to see that some people who are at the head of their corporations 'get it'.
Now, if only they had a better webmaster...
Re:What about textbooks? (Score:1)
Re:Related technology... (Score:1)
Re:Looks good now (Score:2)
Baen is willing to show the consumer is books, and let them choose to pay if they think it's worth while.
King wanted people to pay by the chapter, and not see the goods until after they paid. H's also a jerk, he wanted to charge paper prices for something that cost him less, so he'd make like ten times as much as before, without giving anything back to the customer. And then he cancelled the project, screwing the people who had paid.
We'd laugh at someone selling MP3s for CD prices, why is it reasonable that King wanted to change paper prices for an ebook? Especially since King has his head up his anus and wants people to pay twice for another copy of the bits, despite just wanting to read it in a new place. That may be correct under a strict interpretation of copyright law, but it makes no sense if you understand how the electronic media works.
But, to answer the other part of the question, yes, I am supporting Baen. (Webscriptions, not in paper.)
pokemon. (Score:1)
Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there! (Score:1)
Re:Related technology... (Score:1)
Re:Related technology... (Score:1)
Gibson says it too! (Score:1)
[about the copyright in the web]
It's complicated but no serious threat for me. If i would be a pop musician i would have to think how to stick with the new reality. You see, the great thing about a printed book is, taht it is much easier to move and use than everything you can produce from a download. If i would put the whole text into the web, somebody could download it and print it out. But such a printout would be rather primitive. Somebody elso could download the text, and use much effort to create it with typography as a book as we have it here now. Thats not too complicated. But he would need the paper, the ink and just too much time. That would make no sense, if he could buy the ready book for a few bucks in the bookstore. So, why should i be afraid?
[about opposite thought from others]
Since the 16th century text is best delivered in a book. The easiest way to get something readable is to buy a book produced from wood and ink in a bookstore. To copy the text from a book is very easy, but if you clone a whole book, you have stolen a whole book, a media. Thats something pretty different and it's unlawfull since the 19th century. If someone just wants to read the text, he could have it for free. Thats fine with me, i don't care.
[about his texts in the web]
If i would learn, that an unauthorized chinese translation would be sold as printed books in china i would immediate try to stop that. But if the same translation would be available in the web, i won't do anything. I would think: Hey, thats cool, what a fine thing.
Sure helped Flint's sales (Score:1)
Baen books bundles that had Flint books in them
as soon as I heard about this....
Re:Wow, open source taken to the next level. (Score:1)
Of course, there are those that are stupid enough to think that since they read Tolkien after reading some author that obviously ripped him off that Tokien is a copy cat. To those people I say:
1. Engage brain.
2. Check original publishing dates.
3. Feel ashamed.
But, my point was that it is tough to truly appreciate Tolkien if you don't read some other fantasy work first, and it is really tough to appreciate other fantasy work if you don't read it before Tolkien.
Re:This a bad thing. (Score:1)
If you see a commercial for an album on TV before it comes out, especially during prime time, that is not a band of musicians.
I especially love the bands that try to portray themselves as the poor repressed youth that aren't understood by anyone, yet are obviously paid for all the way by corporate rock. (Godsmack and A Perfect Circle come to mind.)
Oh, I'm sorry, what was the subject again?
Re:Alles in Ordnung?! (Score:1)
Anyway, to follow your arguments, English should be the best candidate for creating an association with oppression and colonialism. Why? Because Great Britain was once the mightiest colonial power which encouraged slave trade and ruthlessly suppressed any uprising against its rule.
2.You placed the adjective "totalitarian" before the word "communism". Do you honestly believe that there are other flavors of communism which are not totalitarian?
Great Idea (Score:2)
Re:Related technology... (Score:1)
Alles in Ordnung?! (Score:2)
Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!
Germany = Nazi-Germany?
Or is it a quote?
Wow, open source taken to the next level. (Score:1)
BTW has anyone out there read 'lord of the rings' ? It totally rules, and 'the hobbit'.
Gee I hope I don't come over as a stereotype linux geek :-). OOops I'm listening to the 'dead.
Got to go, time to go and wash my beard. (I do this every month whether it needs it or not)...
I disagree (Score:1)
Sorry, but I disagree with this whole-heartedly. Just because a writer or musician is popular (ie, lots of people are familiar with their name), doesn't mean they don't need word of mouth. I have very little interest in King or Metallica, even though I am very familiar with them. If I was ever going to buy a Stephen King book right now, I would need a friend telling me how good it was. Same goes for Metallica and lots of other artists: I'd never buy one of their CDs unless it was recommended to me via word of mouth.
Yes, this is only a personal example, but I'm certain many people act the same way I do when it comes to buying CDs, books...even from "Popular" artists.
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boils down to micropayments (Score:1)
not all of us live in the usa and the minimum funds transfer charges are rather high.
many great sharewares are pirated for this reason. i hope gnu comes out with a sound micropayment system that can be deployed on these free books and other sites. why , even free s/w authors could be sent some cash to encourage them.
Of course, context is everything... (Score:2)
He said as he was caught using Napster to download the latest Metallica single
Rich
online books. (Score:2)
It is a wonderful idea, and I appauled the creator, but for now I will stick to Amazon and the library.
Where do I pay? (Score:2)
I agree with most others that reading books online isn't as convenient as paper versions at the moment, but it will one day be. There is even the possibility of a book with paper (or very much paper like) pages that can change it's text. That may seem a bit far out now, but in 20 years it could very well be a reality.
And I am willing to pay the same amount for the online book as I would pay for the physical version. Of course with such great advances as we have even now, I get to read the book first and decide how much I would like to pay for it.
So I ask again, where is the link to pay for these books?
Palm format? (Score:1)
Ebook on PocketPC (Score:1)
More info here [microsoft.com].
After a while you even forget that you are not reading on paper and best of all, whith the beautiful screen of the iPaq or the Cassiopea, you can read in the dark. And on top of that you could even play some background MP3.
Try to do that with your Palm!!!
Re:who are these guys? (Score:1)
Re:Looks good now (Score:1)
Even if this just serves to give lesser known authors exposure, the publishers won't be able to tell unless there is some kind of impact on their sales (hopefully positive). So if you like it, buy it and we can see more free books online.
(Also, there are people like me who reread books several times over and will buy books they really like...)
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Re:Looks good now (Score:4)
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
Well articulated (Score:1)
Reminds me of when Isaac Asimov... (Score:5)
...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:Where do I pay? (Score:1)
Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there! (Score:1)
As I stated in an earlier reply to another /.er,
Publishing online some older works, to generate interest in newer ones, would be a good idea even for the most popular authors.
Re:Piracy shouldn't be a problem (Score:1)
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:1)
Most real musicians have gone underground-Fallacy (Score:1)
Vermifax
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:1)
You are falling into the trap that assumes "most people are thieves." Eric Flint address this directly in the Introduction. [baen.com] He says, "most people would rather be honest than dishonest...One of the things about the online debate over e-piracy that particularly galled me was the blithe assumption by some of my opponents that the human race is a pack of slavering would-be thieves held (barely) in check by the fear of prison sentences. Oh, hogwash."
I think the same arguement can be made for music listeners. I know that I have the desire to purchase CDs (getting the cover artwork, liner notes, etc) and I think most people feel the same way. After all, the percentage of slashdot trolls in the world is rather small.
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Re:Most real musicians have gone underground-Falla (Score:1)
And assuming that a member of an orchestra is as real as musicians get is kind of going overboard on generalizations. I've been in a few orchestras, and let me tell you, some of those people are nothing more than elitist scum. They know all the chords, they know all the notes, they play technically brilliant and know it. But they have absolutely no heart whatsoever. They don't pour their soul into their music. And to me, that is what makes a real musician.
Of course, this is a touchy subject to me so I'll leave it at that.
Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there! (Score:2)
Been there, done that, got the CD (Me First and the Gimme Gimmes "Have a Ball" [pitchforkmedia.com]). However, let's assume that absolutely no one would be willing to pay for a commercially available work that they could easily get for free online. So suddenly Weber has thousands of people downloading and reading "On Basilisk Station", but not paying him any money. But there's a catch.
There are something like 9 or 10 Honor Harrington novels that Weber's written. Only the first one is available for download. This means that those people who enjoyed "On Basilisk Station" and want more will wander to their local bookstore or amazon.com and start forking over cash. People who, if not for the freely available copy of "On Basilisk Station", might never have located his books in the first place.
It's a win-win situation. Customers get a free book with no obligation. Authors get a means to expand their audience and (hopefully) sell more of their other books.
Re:Piracy shouldn't be a problem (Score:1)
I regularly read long novels on my PDA, and serialized amateur fiction on-line. It's quite easy to download and convert HTML or text files to DOC format and load them into a PDA reader; freeware conversion software for Windows and Linux can be found on Palm Gear HQ [palmgear.com]. (For Linux, look for dtk).
I like reading on a PDA; for some reason, it's easier on my eyes than staring at a CRT for hours, and it's half the size of paperback and goes everywhere. (Solves the problem of not being able to take your computer into the bathroom to read from). IMHO, PDAs have made e-books a reality.
I discovered the Baen Free Library and their Web Subscription service (they offer a nice selection of their non-free books as downloadable e-books if you buy a subscription.. go there and check it out for the details) just before Christmas. It was really nice reading On Basilisk Station (one of their FREE offerings) again--my paperback copy was ragged and missing somewhere in the den.
A Paradigm Shift in Publishing (Score:1)
Re:who are these guys? (Score:1)
I would say that you are not a science-fiction reader, then. Both David Drake and David Weber are well-known, prolific modern Sci-Fi authors. Eric Flint seems to be an up & coming new sci-fi author. I have seen the works of every one of the authors in the Baen Free Library and the Baen Webscriptions service as offerings from the Science Fiction Book Club over the last two years or so, so I don't think they are exactly obscure.
Also, note that the Baen Free Library does not offer ALL the works by a given author, just a few that a given author is willing to give a way for free online. David Drake has many dozens of novels to his name, and David Weber has over a dozen.
Re:Palm format? (Score:1)
Download the MobiPocket reader from the same site. The .PRC files are DOC-format files with extra vaguely-XML-looking formattting used by that reader. Alternatively, if you hate MobiPocket and prefer TealDoc or some other reader, download the HTML and run it through a conversion program to convert it to plain vanilla DOC. I'm happy with MobiPocket for the Baen books, and TealDoc for everything else, and since my PDA will run both, no problem. Isn't freedom of choice great?
Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Where do I pay? (Score:2)
For now, it seems like the best way to pay and prove them right is to go out and buy a physical copy (either locally or via some online place like BooksaMillion [booksamillion.com]) of the same book. Then, if you don't want it cluttering your shelves, give it away to a friend or donate it to a library or something.
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Re:Wow, open source taken to the next level. (Score:2)
OK, I hereby nominate you for a '+1, funny.' But seriously, a lot of people think that the user's right to modify the content is the main point of open source, so they think open-source books are therefore a stupid idea. Actually, open-sourcing a novel (I don't think it's been done yet?) wouldn't mean you could modify the version the author distributed. It's like Linux. You don't get to modify the version of the kernel that Linus distributes unless he decided to let you.
And when it comes to nonfiction, it can make a lot of sense to allow people to fork off their own versions.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:What about textbooks? (Score:3)
are you in human resources?
--
eBook devices, man! (Score:2)
Only two downsides to the Rocket device are the slow bootup time (close to 10 seconds) and the extra weight. It's just a little too heavy to hold for a long time.
I've already complained to Amazon that they only support the Microsoft reader, of course. There's even a bit in their FAQ where they say they don't support handhelds yet. Oh, joy.
Duane
Online intellectual property piracy is a fallacy. (Score:4)
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..... (Score:4)
.....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:This a bad thing. (Score:2)
Since when have musicians stopped making music??? Look! There's Brittney Spears, and Eminem and... Oh. I see your point.
My book is online and it is selling well (Score:2)
Using Samba (Score:2)
Still, I began reading Using Samba online, and after reading much of it I grabbed the book because it was so useful, sure, I can load it into my palm pilot, but that is a pain in the ass. I suppose I could print it out too, but I prefer dead-tree form.
The other advantage to this is of course that when I am working on a server I don't have the book with me on location, so I fire up a browser and read.
I also purchased The Unix CD Bookshelf. [oreilly.com] I already have Unix Power Tools [oreilly.com] in dead-tree format, but being able to search the HTML version is very handy. Sure, I know where to get the warez version of this CD, and maybe the purchased edition comes with Unix in a Nutshell as a bonus, but I bought the set because it was valuable to me, and I support O'Reilly. Does having books online increase readership? I certanly think so, my friend who has both of the O'Reilly CD compilations that he got from Warez Ftp has not read them, well, he claims he read Building Internet firewalls, and TCP/IP Network Administration. But then again, he also claims that he read Running Linux in one day and grokked it all (yet he can't seem to use a bash prompt very well...)The truth is, he hardly got anything out of the online versions, I do, but I mainly use the online material for reference, not for general reading.
There is no doubt in my mind that O'Reillys decision to place some of their books on the web for download (or in plain HTML on CD) has greatly increased my purchase of their books.
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:2)
How horrible your life must have been without "libraries" or "record stores" in your town, so that you had to turn to the web before you could read a book before purchasing it or sample a CD before buying it.
You're ignoring the fact that libraries and record stores are only filled with the products put out by the same companies which are fighting mp3s/ebooks. He had to turn to the web because he was sick of all the substandard material being produced by the major record companies and publishing houses.
In addition I have been reading alot of literature lately, which for either popularity or political reasons isn't readily available in the states. I have to read it online or go to certain lengths to get it. Other examples might be people who are not near a library or one of the record stores which allow you to listen to music before you buy it. Some of us have to walk in the snow or ride a bus if we want to go somewhere. We're not all priveledged enough to have a car, or tastes and interests that are convieniently in the majority, like you apparently are.
This isn't Free Documentation. It's Free Beer. (Score:2)
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:3)
"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? (Score:2)
Publisher x publishes "Expensive Science Book" by Prof Copyright for $180
Publisher y publishes "Dear Science" by Prof Grabbinmoney for $180
"Open Source Science" released
Publisher z publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $60
Publisher x publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $50
Publisher y publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $40
Publisher z publishes "Open Source Science" by O.S.Community for $30 and includes the book on a CD
Publisher x publishes "Open Source Science", "Free Mathematics" and "GNU Computer programming" as an omnibus edition for $60
The price differential with the copyright books is now so big that people are flocking to use "open source science" so
Publisher x publishes "Expensive Science Book" by Prof Copyright for $80
Publisher y publishes "Dear Science" by Prof Grabbinmoney for $80
See, competition leads to lower prices and more choice. And even though the original copyright books were not competing at first, in this example, the open source option caused a big enough price differential to drag their prices down as well (although admitedly, this wouldn't necessarily occur)
Rich
Re:who are these guys? (Score:2)
This is a method of publicity, yes--but then, Baen considers its entire Webscription program [themestream.com] itself to be little more a method of publicity, as low as the prices are that it charges--and there are those better-known authors who are incensed at having to sell their books so cheaply (and without DRM copy-protection to boot).
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Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there! (Score:2)
A counterexample: I've had a few thousand dollars in sales of my book [lightandmatter.com], which is available as a free download. (A few more k$ and I'll have made back my investment in printing!
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:What about textbooks? (Score:3)
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.
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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Rice is already doing it. (Score:2)
We've got our own DTD (although are trying to borrow from existing stuff like the Dublin Core elements when possible) to do page markup for educational content, and XSL+CSS stylesheets to turn that into XHTML+MathML that browsers (well, currently just Mozilla; soon IE too we hope) can read.
Wish I could give you a URL, but all the good stuff is being restricted to on-campus access right now.
There's also a couple universities working on a similar system, and a company doing the same sort of thing (although aimed more at corporate training). It's an idea whose time has come; it's just a question of who gets there first.
More free lit onlnie (Score:3)
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.htm
Content versus medium (Score:2)
First up, a general comment: the best thing about this Slashdot article is not the free books at the other end (I'm not planning on reading any of them -- no time for it at the moment) but rather the remarkably clueful commentary about why giving away free e-books is a good idea. Read it. I doubt I'll read anything else more interesting than it today.
But now, in direct response to the previous poster, advances in publishing technologies (like laser printers and CD burners) are not going to put authors and musicians out of business. They might put publishers out of business eventually, but that's just the nature of change. On the other hand, maybe publishers will just change what it is they do and become marketers rather than manufacturers.
But authors and musicians, as the article on the site points out, are in no danger of being replaced by machines. If people want to read books and listen to music, then someone needs to be writing the books and composing and playing the music. If there are enough people willing to part with enough money to create a market for books and music, then the market will arise one way or another, with "copyright" or without.
At the moment, all remuneration for copyrighted works is done retrospectively: the artist or author has already done all their work by the time you pay for a CD or book. If this scheme breaks down because of rampant "piracy", then it may eventually mutate into a scheme whereby artists and authors start with loss leaders, making some works available for free, then saying "there's more where that came from if enough people send me money".
There's a technological hurdle to overcome here, of course. It can't work without extraordinary ease of communication and payment. We've basically got the former now, but not the latter. The payment technologies which do exist still haven't quite managed to be killer apps. Reading the author's book is pretty easy, but getting him a payment easily is another matter. When it becomes as easy as tossing a coin in a busker's hat, the economics of the information-based markets will change almost overnight.
When such technology manages to break past the widespread-acceptance barrier, my prediction is that the giant faceless corporations of the entertainment industry will be badly undermined by the fact that new artists will get a much better deal in the free marketplace than by signing up with them. The publishers will find their supply of new talent cut off, and eventually have nothing new to sell. Their reduced dominance may persuade lawmakers to stop extending their copyrights retrospectively and making draconian "protective" laws. Then what will they do? They'll actually have to start providing a service to artists and audiences, or nobody will notice their passing.
Free books?! (Score:2)
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Re:This a bad thing. (Score:2)
Re:Great Idea (Score:2)
You'd be better off to give away 10 million free copies and sell 1 million than to only sell 600,000.
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Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there! (Score:2)
Very true. However, electronic texts have one very distinct advantage, which has only been tangentially touched on:
Ease of transport.
I have a number of books on CD. (Most are reference books, although I have Project Gutenberg's archives on a pair of CDs, courtesy of Walnut Creek.) True, they're not as convenient as paper books, but they're terrific when I need to travel; much lighter and more compact than stacks of books.
Or, for a more common example: I am a Perl programmer, and therefore lazy. Occasionally I need to refresh my memory on some syntax issue.* I could walk across the room, pick my copy of Programming Perl out of the bookcase, flip to the index, flip to the correct section, and read. However, it's much easier for me to grab my Perl CD Bookshelf, click, click, click, done. Same for Design Patterns.
Other posters in this story have mentioned PDAs much more skillfully than I can, so I won't go there.
* Amazingly, despite Perl's clean and elegant syntax, I still need to look up the meaning of simple expressions like "$[=$.".
What about textbooks? (Score:2)
In particular I thought that elementary or middle school math books might be a perfect candidate. Math concepts don't change wildly, and the structure seems pretty straightforward...concept, examples, problems... I even started working on an XML DTD to define this.
Anyone else think this might be useful?
Re:It encourages piracy (Score:2)
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Re:Palm format? (Score:2)
http://www.peanutpress.com [peanutpress.com] and there's even a Slashdot article on it [slashdot.org]
Don't forget:
http://www.memoware.com/ [memoware.com]
http://www.tomeraider.com/ [tomeraider.com]
www.matthewmiller.net [matthewmiller.net]
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:5)
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.
Netlibrary (Score:2)
Forget free though: Anyone interested in cognitive science can get access to all the MIT press books in cognitive science* at netlibrary (in encrypted downloadable and web form) for just $120 (students) or $240 (everyone else) by going to cognet.mit.edu. It also includes access to the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, and The New Cognitive Neurosciences 2nd Ed, and everything else they say they offer (the "community" aspect is non existent though - it basically consists of announcements {talks, seminars}, and interesting links.
*(includes hundreds of books in: neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, AI {genetic algorithms, computational intelligence, neural networks, etc}, linguistics, culture, evolutionary biology, and several other topics).
Thousands of Free Books! or Project Gutenberg (Score:4)
Amigori
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Books are a great alternative to video games.
Random "Free" PDF Books (Score:2)
"Handbook Of Applied Cryptography [uwaterloo.ca]"
"Numerical Recipes in {c, fortran} [ulib.org]"
"The Scientist & Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing [analog.com]"
"Using Z [ox.ac.uk]"
"The Red Book [ii.uib.no]"
etc. I'm sure there are a ton of others.
GNUArt (Score:2)
The difference with what's happening here is that if these books were GPL'ed, they'd not only be free of charge but they could also be reworked by anybody prior to being distributed once again for free. Well, you know the GPL, don't you ?
Anyway, even if they only made these books free as in free beer, it is a good thing that these authors accepted to take whatever some might call a "risk".
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Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:2)
but those are the reasons you bought the book - not some moral obligation you felt to pay a usage fees.
I've purchased CDs from MP3.com for that very reason. I want to support the artists whose music I like. I've downloaded entire albums from mp3.com, yet I still paid for them. Now I'm sure there are a lot of kids out there that download stuff for free and never give it a second thought. But they usually don't have the tons of cash it takes to buy the CDs anyway, I know I never did. It's the post-college crowd that will be more likely to pay I think.
Looks good now (Score:2)
The next step is to put our money where our mouths are. If you read these books and think they're any good, go buy them.
Prove to the publisher that this sort of experiment is good for them, and we'll see more of it. Don't just post to /. and say you like it.
Just my $.02
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Not excessively old material, either. (Score:2)
I googled the three Drake titles, and got copyrights of 1997, 1998, and 1999 (not in that order).
Most of his work doesn't push my buttons, and in fact I didn't even bother finishing his overhyped Lord of the Isles, but I heartily recommend his old novel Birds of Prey. SciFi meets ancient Rome, kind of thing. That one really ought to be made into a movie.
If you like Birds of Prey, then try his Vettius and Friends, which is a collection of short stories set in ancient Rome (sans SciFi, with a couple of exceptions), including a wonderful man vs. shark story that purportedly predates Jaws.
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who are these guys? (Score:2)
Now if these guys are popular artists and people have heard of them I apologize. But I've worked in some libraries for quite a few years and I can't judge whether or not these guys actually have a popular following yet... maybe this is their way of grabbing 15 minutes of fame =)
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac (Score:2)
But they usually don't have the tons of cash it takes to buy the CDs anyway,
This comment illustrate what's the biggest fallacy on 'piracy'. Fact: most people have a limited budget to buy CD / software. Therefore, counting every 'pirated' product as a lost income for 'IP producers' is wrong; since if there was'nt any 'pirating' means available, most people would not have bought more. Therefore the theoretical loss is zero, nil, nada, zilch.
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Re:Thousands of Free Books! or Project Gutenberg (Score:2)
Kithran
Re:What about textbooks? (Score:2)
Schools spend all this money on these new Compaqs (although Compaqs do suck) and such great new "technology" but they fail to do anything that *really* helps the students. I'm sorry, but access to the Internet going at 1.6 kilobytes a second doesn't help me that much. It's more there for the teachers and their e-mail, etc. Unfortunately, "high technology" is just a buzzword in the education system. It's a shame they don't focus on more important things.