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I must say, this seems like a bad example. First of all, the books are all about Mac software. Why would I want to read that on a PDA? If we're talking about downloading to a computer, why would I want to pay money when a few minutes of Google will help me out? Sure, it's convenient. But it's not even guaranteed. And $10 seems like a high price for an electronic document covering basic material. I suppose neophyte Macaddicts may spring for it but there are plenty of free resources. All in all, I think Baen books are a much better example.

Baen has done it, and it worked great. Cory Doctorow has done it (I think his publisher is Tor), and it worked great. I've done it, and it worked great.

Another inovation of Baen Books is the Free Library where complete eBooks can be downloaded at no cost. (Free Library)

Yog wrote: Even easier: if you buy the hard copy of a book, you get a free download of the e-book. Sort of like providing the source code with a software application.

Baen basically did that when they published the most recent David Weber novel in the Honor Harrington series in paperback. In the back of the book was a CD-ROM with the full text of the book and (if memory serves) all the other books in the series. Apparently it didn't cause a problem because the next thing they did was to include John Ringo's entire backlist on a CD-ROM with his recent book Hell's Faire.

Baen has been distributing quite a few of its backlist titles for free in electronic form for reading on PDA's, onscreen, etc. and it has been increasing their sales. Check out the Baen Free Library if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy novels.

They also have a web subscription service where for $15/month you can get access to titles that are about to be published. The first month you get the first half of the book, the second month you get the next quarter, and the last month you get the final quarter, and they promise that a minimum of four books will be available in a given month. It looks like they have six available right now.

After the books are published, you can just buy an electronic version if you want for $4-6. That's a decent deal, considering that the even paperbacks often cost more than that these days.

Yog wrote: Even easier: if you buy the hard copy of a book, you get a free download of the e-book. Sort of like providing the source code with a software application.

Baen basically did that when they published the most recent David Weber novel in the Honor Harrington series in paperback. In the back of the book was a CD-ROM with the full text of the book and (if memory serves) all the other books in the series. Apparently it didn't cause a problem because the next thing they did was to include John Ringo's entire backlist on a CD-ROM with his recent book Hell's Faire.

Baen has been distributing quite a few of its backlist titles for free in electronic form for reading on PDA's, onscreen, etc. and it has been increasing their sales. Check out the Baen Free Library if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy novels.

They also have a web subscription service where for $15/month you can get access to titles that are about to be published. The first month you get the first half of the book, the second month you get the next quarter, and the last month you get the final quarter, and they promise that a minimum of four books will be available in a given month. It looks like they have six available right now.

After the books are published, you can just buy an electronic version if you want for $4-6. That's a decent deal, considering that the even paperbacks often cost more than that these days.

More people with color PDAs with removable memory slots

Cheaper flash media (getting there)

Elimination of copy protection (Project Gutenberg and Baen.com are my primary ebook sources)

I buy eBooks from http://www.baen.com/. These are full novels, with no DRM, priced at $4 and $5 a book.

I read them on my PocketPC-based iPaq 1910, which I find quite usable. With the font antialiasing that the OS does, and the good contrast, I often actually prefer to read books this way. Not to mention that I can read in the dark in bed, while my wife sleeps.

In addition, I can bring a whole library with me, so that if I finish one book, I have a selection to continue with, without the weight additional books would cause.

With the Baen website, I can buy an eBook, and download it in formats suitable for PalmOS and PocketPC (I get both as my wife has a Palm PDA), as well as HTML and RTF formats. And if I lose my eBook somehow, I can go and download it again, as they are always available.

What we need to promote eBook usage is more publishers like Baen who "get it". For an eBook, no DRM is very important for me. I upgrade PDAs periodically (and my wife might want to read the book), so I want a format that will continue to work on each new PDA. I'd also prefer that the price be discounted some, as there are no (significant) production, distribution, and stocking costs. Baen gives me both of these, and I hope like hell that they succeed.

Just as iTunes has caused me to buy more music in the past couple of years than I ever have before, Baen is causing me to buy more books.

John

Maybe I'm just a gadget freak but, frankly, I've never understood the problem. I read paper books and a few magazines as well, but don't much care how the words get in front of my eyeballs.

Maybe I'm just a gadget freak but, frankly, I've never understood the problem. I read paper books and a few magazines as well, but don't much care how the words get in front of my eyeballs.

I'm reading Andre Norton's Time Traders from the Baen Free Library using Mobireader on a Palm Zaire 72.

I'm not thrilled with it, preferring a real book, but it is readable and the ability (if I actually bought a dictionary for my palm) to look up words right there and make annotations is pretty cool.

Tech books seem more likely, but the convience of having a number of books at no additional weight is really nice, especially when I travel.

The biggest thing killing ebooks right now? High cost and DRM. I don't want to pay more (or even the same) for an e-book and I want to be able to read it on several devices.

Audible.com has better pricing (and they have to pay someone to read the thing) so I'm not sure why e-books don't.

I have several of the books available at the Baen Free Library. Many of which I bought after reading them there. I've also bought additional books by some of those authors after reading their works online.

At the the risk of violating copyright laws...

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson (but you knew that, right?)

Oops, my bad, I meant Baen, of course, not bean.

I never suggested any crime. Lots of authors release free ebooks these days. I don't think that's an unreasonable request to make of someone who seems to support the freedom of informationas much as this guy. Mr. Vaidhyanathan submitted a great friend-of-the-court brief in support of Emmanuel Goldstien and 2600back in 2000, so I figured the guy'd be nice enough to put his book out for open electro distro, perhaps like Bean does.

Yes, it would. Too bad that it doesn't work that way in reality. The Baen Free Library has found that the dead-tree copies of their titles actually increase in sales after being posted online for free download.

Yes, it would. Too bad that it doesn't work that way in reality. The Baen Free Library has found that the dead-tree copies of their titles actually increase in sales after being posted online for free download.

Until computers can do everything that I possibly want them to do [...] there will always be jobs for programmers.

Absolutely, 100% agreed.

Just pointing out that even if the premise of the argument (open source puts programmers out of work) were true, it's *still* a good thing. But it's not true, for the reasons you and many other respondants have mentioned.

BTW, if you haven't already read it, you might find Eric Flint's related essay interesting. He basically makes the same argument in a different field, fiction. At the end of his long and well-written rant, in which he dissects various arguments that claim on-line piracy of fiction will destroy fiction and impoverish authors, he presents his final argument like this:

The future can't be foretold. But, whatever happens, so long as writers are essential to the process of producing fiction -- along with editors, publishers, proofreaders (if you think a computer can proofread, you're nuts) and all the other people whose work is needed for it -- they will get paid. Because they have, as a class if not as individuals, a monopoly on the product. Far easier to figure out new ways of generating income -- as we hope to do with the Baen Free Library -- than to tie ourselves and society as a whole into knots. Which are likely to be Gordian Knots, to boot.

As long as there is a need which people are willing to pay to fill, the people who fill that need will get paid. Fiction, software, music, haircuts, brake jobs, you name it. For information-based products, the Internet may mean that the models have to be adjusted, but there will be a way.

Here's a teaser, but when you get to the bit near the end with Thandi Palane and Victor Cachat (as observed by Princess Ruth Winton), you'll turn into a regular fire suppressant station.

Baen is realy nice to, if you like Military SF and fantasy. They have a nice free library, and none of their e-books are DRM encumbered. Once you've burned through the free library the non-gratis e-books aren't that expensive either, and still not DRM encumbered. You may also want to check out Project Gutenberg for some older fiction.

Given the prevalence of books on tape (or CD or MP3) and the time spent commuting, its easy to see why black marks on dead tree pulp are less frequently perused.

Pity e-books haven't taken off. They probably need the OLED displays. Given a decent text-to-speech software and a high end PDA and the Gutenberg project, and Baen's library, a guy could read until needed his eyes for driving and then listen in his car.

NUKES! BIG FRIGGIN' NUKES! There's only one way to fight a space war before phasers and photons, and that's with Gigawatt lasers/masers and BIG ASS NUKES!

You have obviously not learned the Kzinti Lesson, studied Operation Hard Rock, nor considered the weapons implications of antimatter, which we know the proto-federation has at its disposal in at least modest quantities, or the weapons possibilities of a teleporter. (NB: "Given the assumptions in (I) and (II) you don't really get a society. You get a short war.") Nor, for that matter, realized that some SF implications of 9/11 were considered at least back in 1998, over three years before the plane hit the Pentagon.

SF wars have been considered for for a long time now, and there's many other promising possibilites besides nukes. (And if you think the military doesn't pay attention, think again. They have been giving at least half an ear to what the SF guys are babbling about for a long time now.)

That said, I'm also one of those hoping this temporal cold war thing will end with one last change wiping it out of history, even though they've done that trick before.

But you can't protect the individual artist without protecting the person whom buys copy rights from that artist - through contract or otherwise.

The individual musician needs to be protected from the RIAA, not P2P. It's not the people sharing their music who are cutting into their profits -- it's the people who are making millions off that music and not giving those musicians a slice. If you believe record industry accountants, even top-selling CDs don't actually make a profit. The record labels are actually a charity operation, running barely at break-even, just helping the poor musicians get some CDs out there. Or so they tell the musicians when royalty payment time comes around. Of course, all of the industry executives just happen to be independantly wealthy, which explains the million-dollar houses and the lifestyles to match.

This has nothing to do with P2P.

It has everything to do with P2P. The musicans don't make money from CD sales. The record labels make a killing, but few of the people who actually make the music -- only a handful at the very top -- ever make any money off of CDs. For them, it's a way to get people to hear their music so that those people will go to their concerts.

The record companies know that if there was a way for the musicians to get that music directly to the people who are listening to it, in order to entice them to buy the concert tickets and the T-shirts, then they, the record companies, will be irrelevant. Dinosaurs. Buggy whip makers. A business with neither suppliers nor customers.

A handful of top name musicans agree with them, because they know they're "top" because of their celebrity status, not because their music is any better than a hundred or a thousand up-and-coming competitors, and they want to keep that lock they have on the CD sales and the radio airplay. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose by people discovering that Seether sounds just as good as Metallica. But for most -- all of the ones creating great music and trying to make a living at it -- the recording industry cartel is their enemy. Their fans aren't the enemy, the people who would hear their music and go to a concert or, yes, order a CD, aren't the enemy. The enemy is the people who want to make huge profits off their music and keep all the money for themselves. The cartel known as the RIAA.

That same artist who has little popularity and is not centrist enough to get a record contract... is the one hurt the most by P2P.

Um, how about "no"?

The only CDs he's likely to be selling are the ones from the card table by the door when he plays some local club. His music is not in the stores, not on the racks at Wal-Mart or WorstBuy or Strawberries. He's making a living off opening for better-known acts, playing at clubs, getting gigs where he can, and probably delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Nobody knows about his website, nobody knows about his music, and except for the people who hear him locally, nobody ever will.

If he puts his music out there on the P2P networks and encourages people to share it, then people who don't happen to live in his home town will hear him. People who don't randomly wander across his website will hear him. People who will love his music, who will go to his concerts, who will buy his Cafe Press T-shirts, and who will even order a physical CD off his website because they think he's awesome and want to support and encourage him, will hear him.

For him, P2P is a lifesaver and the RIAA, the recording industry who wants to make sure that nobody sells music without giving them the lion's share of the profits, the industry that wants to make sure that it's as hard as possible for him to get the fame (and sales) his music deserves, is the real enemy.

There's a book publisher who has put their money (and their copyrights) where their mouth is. Check out the Baen Free Library. For the pas

...railway spike hammered down through the case into the CPU and the surface of the desk beneath.

Being MS-Windows, you might need to use hardwood stake instead, in which case I recommend either Wandoo or what the PNG call "Ironwood" (which loosely corresponds with San Martin's Ferran from David Weber's Honorverse).

I'd recommend first off porting the apps in question to Linux (well, to not-MS-Windows) where that can be readily done because it's easy to make the program into the WM (if they exit, they get a new session running... the same program).

If the app is well behaved, you can do this using WINE and no port... [/ME pauses to wonder whether that pun was part of the original rationale for the acronym]... and using NX you can now give other users efficient platform-independent sessions on such a box at no extra charge.

Plus there's the instant-thin-client aspect to think about. Something screwy with the system? Doorbell time. No hard disks to worry about the structure of.

It might also save you some trouble if you're forced to stick with MS-Windows to put all of these apps on a Terminal Services box and lock it down once-for-all rather than locking down n workstations. This also gives you another opportunity to Linuxify (with rdesktopification) and/or thinclientise the workstations themselves (sorry, didn't get much sleep last night and am feeling a bit Dubya now).

Conversely, Eric Flint has an interesting opinion, too. And, of course, the place to find those free books...

Conversely, Eric Flint has an interesting opinion, too. And, of course, the place to find those free books...

Someone noted a while back that Ellison didn't really get nasty until he started working regularly in Hollywood. Hollywood, the place where dreams are made of and those who first invent the dreams are routinely shit on. Ellison was always an abrasive sort, but Hollywood taught him to attack first, second, and last or see his visions completely warped by the time they hit the screen. And he's been dealing with Hollywood execs for a looong time.

The example where things didn't go his way that is most commonly quoted is "The City on the Edge of Forever" for Star Trek. He wrote that episode in March of 1966. He was still pissed about how it was altered for airing in 1995 when White Wolf published the unaltered screenplay for him. Mind you, this was an episode of Star Trek won the 1966-67 Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay, and the 1967 Hugo Award, the first (only) teleplay to ever do so.

He's also seen his stories ripped off for movies and television both, accreditation stripped, and on and on. Yes, he's a vengeful sort. Yes, he's got a blind spot the size of Texas when it comes to the differences between fan driven exposure and corporate ripoffs. Yes, it's clear that he thinks a model like Baen Publishing's Free Library is insane.

IMO he's still one of the most original science fiction and fantasy authors of his generation, and I have a deep and abiding respect for what he has accomplished. I'd love to get him on the side of those who would prefer to see more free exposure of his works. I don't think it'll ever happen, though. His experiences during his career have warped his view of the marketplace pretty badly.

If you want an interesting view of the term "conservative", read 1633 from Baen Books (it's free on their free site). The premise is that a small town in the Appalacians gets sent back in time to 1600s Germany. One guy wants to change the way things are being done, and it is expected he will join the conservative political party du jour. The character snickers and says something along the lines of "I wonder how long it will take him to figure out he threw his vote in with the socialist party." The other person is surprised, and the first explains that conservative is about maintaining the status quo (keep things the way they were, conserve).

It makes you wonder why we use it to mean right-wing, when at best it is a relative term.

I've always found written work more interesting / inspiring than audio. If you are able to, and like scifi like many slashdotters, check out Baen Free Library and Their not-free subscription service

Looking through the names in the article, none jumped out at me as book publishers advocating free-er distribution of books. Looks lke Jim Baen (http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm) and/or Eric Flint (http://www.baen.com/library/palaver_index.htm) would be someone fitting pretty well in that event.

-DVK

Looking through the names in the article, none jumped out at me as book publishers advocating free-er distribution of books. Looks lke Jim Baen (http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm) and/or Eric Flint (http://www.baen.com/library/palaver_index.htm) would be someone fitting pretty well in that event.

-DVK

<a href="http://www.baen.com/library/">Free Science Fiction</a>

On the up side, it's part of the Baen Free Library. At free the only cost is your time.

Once you have your device, check out the Baen ebooks. I buy these. They are all science fiction and fantasy.

Here are some free ones to get you started:

http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

And you can buy more here:

http://www.webscription.net/

No DRM. Just ebooks. They are trusting you not to be a pirate, and charging a fair price, and for that I reward them by buying stuff and recommending them.

Let me say that again. No DRM! No serial numbers, no registration, no limit on the number of cards you can copy it to. No DRM.

Even the ones they want you to pay for have a few chapters online for free. This is to give you a taste of the book, hook you in and make you want to finish reading it. If the book is a collection of stories, often one or more complete stories will be available for free reading.

steveha

I've had a Sony Clié SJ-30 for a year and a half, and I love it! It is an excellent size for my hand and pocket, it has a nice, bright 320x320 color display, a jogwheel for scrolling through pages, and a memory stick slot for plenty of storage.

I use Weasel Reader for reading Gutenberg Etexts, Mobipocket Reader for reading etexts from Baen books, as well as Plucker for web clippings. I also carry along Ultralingua dictionaries so I can look up words when reading French language Gutenberg etexts (ahoy, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea!)

My Sony makes a fantastic e-book reader.. I probably use it for that function as much as for anything else. At 320x320, the screen is easy to read, the high-res fonts are very comfortable, and the backlight is great. It fits easily into my pocket, and I carry it wherever I go. It's USB based, and I sync documents to it from my Red Hat 9 Linux system without problems.

Honestly, any modern Palm OS based device should have USB and a good 320x320 screen, and any of them that you look at should make a good EReader. The Sony's may still be particularly good with their jogwheel, however.

(1) I don't personally believe in copying CDs illegally-- but I think we should avoid using unkind words like "piracy" to describe those that do -- instead, we should describe it as an "infringement", much like a parking infringement.

Objection: In an argument, he who gets to define the terms in any way that suits him usually wins. Let us use established legal terms such as "infringement" since they are unambiguous and uncharged with emotional baggage. Let us also point out that creative works do not belong to the "author" of such, but rather belong to the PEOPLE - and that the people, through their representative, the government, have generously provided a limited term of exclusive rights of distribution of the work to the author. You don't own a song/text/movie, you merely have been granted the right to distribute it for a time. It belongs to us, the people... but of course, you would like us to conveniently forget that so you can continue selling us what is already ours over and over again.

(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.

Simply put, this is an untrue statement. The price of a CD has held steady, and in fact the profit per unit has RISEN - using the RIAA's own numbers! http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2496

What a focus on total revenue hides is that the per unit revenue rose almost 7%, from $13.27 to $14.19. (In inflation-adjusted 1992 dollars, the price rose a less dramatic 0.8% from $11.42 to $11.60) That puts in familiar economic territory, where a price increase leads to a decline in quantity purchased. I think that even Ms. Rosen would agree with the theory that if the price rises, we should expect quantity to fall. If she could dig out her introductory economics textbook, I am sure she would find that if the price of an elastic good rises, the total revenue falls. (If she still doesn't believe me, I'll loan her my textbook, or have her call up airline industry executives or restauranteurs.)

I conducted an analysis of the RIAA's market data from 1992 through 2001. After adjusting their market figures for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, I found that the industry has experienced an average price elasticity of 6.3 (CDs taken alone have an average price elasticity over the period of 2.8). 2001's price elasticity was broadly in line with historical norms.

What is the real issue? Perhaps it's that in 1998, the recording industry was able to eke out both a small inflation-adjusted price increase and an increase in unit shipments, and desperately wants to believe that the return to historic norms was due to illicit file sharing rather than the market returning to historical norms of the past decade.

(4) I believe that piracy is driven by overly long copyright duration, even though most pirated works are recent releases.

Overlong copyright does in fact drive piracy on current works. http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will (long copyright terms) be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such di

JV originally claimed that real soon now Linux Users could legally watch DVD movies. This was how they blew off fair use arguments for DeCSS. Why would anyone neeed to circumvent that, we wil let you legally do it. Yet they stil haven't. (Actually it seems that one can just now do it on Turbolinux but...)

To put it into very simple terms, why should a few Hollywood guys get to limit the rights of a few engineers?

Perhaps the best explanation of what happens is explained in a short story : Read it and se what will happen when we extend copyrights and make oter restrictions in regards to IP.

"More interestingly, the story mentions that despite increases in funding for libraries, spending on books has sharply declined"

And the libraries probably don't know about Project Gutenberg, Baen WikiBooks or the Wikipedia. They're just using it to check their hotmail accounts.

Put a decent printer like in the Internet Bookmobile, and they could have a pretty big collection of books available. But no, it's 10p per sheet on an inket.

Libraries in the UK are even selling shareware, probably not even realising the quality of software that they could give away for free if they wished.

Libraries without enough books could always have a link to Project Gutenberg on their start up page.

A link to the Baen Free Library could be good too.

Trouble is the PCs may end up even more hogged that way.

Would be helpful if libraries could print books themselves from free/public domain material.

Weird coincidence that I read that right now; I recently found Rosenberg's compilation of the first three Guardians of the Flame books in the local library (a bit careworn, it is :); haven't read the series since the fourth, and decided to pick up on them again. I bought the first three books way back when; in the fourth book he 'apparently' killed off the hero (Karl Cullinane); at that point I was into a lot of other things and lost the series, partially because I thought he was ending it. Silly me :)

However, Joel has written quite a few more books in that series. (Wow). You can find a list at the unofficial fan site here. Quite good, even if he has stretched the storyline out a little much, but to someone looking for a great series of fantasy work based loosely off of D&D, they are worth looking into. You can request the books in the series at most libraries if you'd care to sample (even in my rural hamburg I can get them all thru interlibrary loan); I would suggest starting with the original books, however, he builds quite a history, and all the books from the first one are good, and pretty realistic.

Joel seems to be one of the popular-unpopular fantasy writers these days. I rarely see him on the store bookshelf, but he has quite a following. You can also find some chapters of his latest book in the GotF series on Baen's website here .

Enjoy. He's not traditional, but if you are/were into D&D, they can capture you quite effectively. :)

SB

People never want to pay for anything. People are willing to pay when they have no other choice ... if all software could be had for free, then no software would be worth anything.

This is patently untrue. By that rationale, people would never buy:
- bottled water
- packaged software
- 99c tracks off itunes.

After all, all those things are available for free, right? And why would anybody buy an armani suit, when they can get one that looks virtually identical for a tenth of the price?

People will buy when:
- the price is within their means
- they consider the price fair for the good
- they want the good
- the inconvenience of buying the good from the vendor is not too high (i.e. DRM. Personally, any DRM is too high for me, but I recognise that's not universally true)

Case in point. I used to buy a lot of major label music CD's. Now the price is 50% greater than it used to be (~16 retail), now that the style of music I listen to is not to be found very often, now they put DRM on CD's to restrict my use of said CD's (won't play in my car, for example) - combine that with my ethical distaste at said labels current actions, and I have a bonafide reason not to buy their music.

However, I did recently order from CDBaby half a dozen new CD's. The first music I've bought for myself this year. Even though it was inconvenient (getting through customs), even though I had half of them already from legal free samples. Because having a physical CD I could do a high quality rip from was worth the price. Especially given they were half the price of a major label CD. That, and I felt the artists deserved the money.

Acts of skilled creation are scarce, and thus valuable. Making digital copies of said creation is not a scarce act, and no amount of legislation, enforcement or legal tactics will make it otherwise.

As long as people want what scarce (in a technical sense) decent material that's available, then a way will be found to finance those who create. It just may not involve copyright in its current form.

And if you think I'm talking complete crap - well, the guys at the baen free library have demonstrated that giving stuff away increases sales - even of the material they're giving away!

...the Baen bound-into-hardcover CDROMs would make a great addition to any library. Best of all, since they're freely copyable, all it would cost would be a CDROM blank...and they could be easily replaced if anyone broke or lost them.

I've actually taken to putting all five of them (available via BitTorrent at this website), three Blackmask.com public domain book CDROMs, and the free works of Cory Doctorow on a single DVD+ROM and handing it out to folks who have DVD drives.

Another good thing about Baen - all the e-books are in non-DRM formats. They make the books available in rtf, html, and microsoft reader formats, as well as a couple others.

Also, if you want some *legally* free ebooks, they have the free library (around 40-50 titles at least), as well as a cdrom library they started adding to some hardcover books (iso files can be found online in various places, all legal).

Now if only other publishers would learn from Baen...

No, there is enough evidence at Janis Ians website to support this, and Baen Books have been making the same claim with regard to their free library, see janisian.com and Baen Free Library for more info.
[Note: Bean seems to be down ATM]

unless people are changing the author's name on the book, the author is getting recognition. It's not money, admittedly. Maybe this same person wrote the best book in the world, but people still overlooked it.

PLease, please, please, Read what some authors really think about this.

Yes, Eric Flint seems to agree with you, but he also proves, well, I guess you should all go read it yourself. :)

The publishing industry is many hundreds of years older and wiser. (Could it be because some of them still read?) They remember their history, and the last copyright and patent revolt in England: the printers lost, badly; literature survived quite nicely. Modern publishers also realize that lending books ultimately ends up increasing sales longer term; Erik Flint discusses this eloquently at The Baen Free Library.

and the world of creativity coming to an end, where it is not possible to write a program without every line infringing somebody's copyright or patent

For an interesting perspective on this phenomenon, please read "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. And yes, it has actually begun, in fact involving a late Beatle.

Of course some say print is dead. But if print is dead then so too is the novel. No one wants to read 300 plus pages on a screen. And more importantly, no one wants to re-read a novel on screen. Very little interaction with the object there. No sense of "consumption."

I use it to write down whatever tasks I accomplish at work, I use it at the gym to write down weights/reps, I also take notes whenever I want to remember something (like an address, a list of hotel rates, etc), I keep my resume on it as well (I have beamed my resume to a potential employer once; note that I didn't plan to apply at that place, I was merely visiting a friend); of course, its phonebook is also useful (and can hold a lot of info and games are nice, but what really makes this old Palm IIIx useful to me is that it can hold about a dozen novels, so I can read during one of the many trips (bus, plane, train) I make each year. With sites like Project Gutenberg and the Baen free library, I always have books to read and carrying them around is a breeze.

If you're looking for free books in general, there's always the Baen Books' free library page. (Supports a variety of formats.)

From the webpage:
I don't believe that there's any market-demand for teasers or for "Digital Rights Management" technology: [...] so I'm giving this novel to you in three open and flexible formats"

If you want to, go ahead and buy a copy and I'll get my royalty. But there's no obligation on you to buy it if you've read -- you're not ripping me off -- [...] I'm not in competition with my publisher here.

Good to see that there are a few authors and publishers out there that knows that giving away free downloads do not hurt sales -- if the book is good it will most likely sell more. (see Baen Free Library).

As for Doctorow, I enjoyed Down and Out, so I'll surely give this a try.