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Actually, authors have found via the Baen free library that giving away their books in e format resulted in increased sales. Not only did they see the obvious benefit of giving away book one of a series resulting in an increase in the sales of books two, three, four... But the sales of the free book also increased. Check out this interesting summary. Hopefully this doesn't really come as a surprise to Slashdotters, who are some of the loudest preachers of this type of market behavior.

Baen On-Line Library has been doing this for a few years with no registration, DRM, or email addresses needed.

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

Also see Baen's free library at http://www.baen.com/library/

Baen will also sometimes include a CD containing many E-books with certain hardbacks. It's made them some money from me, since I was introduced to certain series (1632, March Upcountry, Honor Harrington) via this.

Which once again reminds me of what is maybe one of the best short stories ever written (IMHO), Spider Robinson's Melancholic Elephants.

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

With every new RIAA related item I get the feeling that Robinson was more a prophet than a sci-fi writer.

He definitely isn't the first to do this. The Publisher Baen has been doing it for years.

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

Just read the comments by Eric Flint and see that the authors who have books in the Library have seen a significant increase in sales. Sure, most of the books are older, and just the first one or two books in the series, but if other readers are anything like I am, then if you read the first book in a series and like it. You will definitely consider buying the second on wards.

Now the fact that he used in mainly to get notices is new, but free books really aren't

This is not something new, Baen books discovered this a while back. They started the Baen free library http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm/. What they discovered was that readership in the authors books skyrocketed. What they found strange was the books posted in the Free library were the ones that started selling!

Can you cite a source for this claim and not just 1 anecdote?

Baen Free Library has had much the same experience. Give it away free, sales go up.

Books are just excellent.

Another more suggestion:

Take your iPod, and use the ipod e-book formatter to put some nice books on your iPod, for reading while you listen to some great music. You can even make playlists that go with the story line!

You can convert e-books here: http://www.ambience.sk/ipod-ebook-creator/ipod-book-notes-text-conversion.php

Some great books here: http://www.craphound.com/index.php?cat=5

and here: http://www.geocities.com/davidbainaa/

and here: http://www.baen.com/library/

Free, or better Creative Commons books, are regularly mentioned on Boing Boing as well.

David Weber http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=DWeber uses voice recognition software for writing novels.

David talking about it back in 2002.
"On a more technical from I began using voice-activated software when I broke my wrist very badly about two years ago. I've found that it tends to increase the rate at which I can write while I'm actually working, but that it's more fatigue-sensitive than a keyboard. You can push your fingers further than you can push your voice when fatigue begins to blur your pronunciation and confuse the voice recognition feature of your software.

I don't think it's had a major impact on my writing style, but it does affect how I compose sentences. What I mean by that is that because the software prefers complete phrases, in order to let it extrapolate from context when it's trying to decide what word to use for an ambiguous pronunciation, I have to decide how I want a sentence to be shaped before I begin talking to a much greater extent than I had to do before I began typing."
http://sfcrowsnest.co.uk/features/arc/2002/nz5718.php

Yep. See how they were able to make a living without depending on copyright? There are even more ways in today's world, and far more money available. I recommend reading Eric Flint's essay.

You misunderstood me, I think. I said that in order to obtain copyright protection, they should have to release the source. That doesn't mean they'd have to allow copies to be made, any more than authors of books allow unauthorized copies, even though their work is essentially open source -- you can see every letter of every word.

Copyright infringement of published source is actually easier to detect than infringement of binary-only software -- and there is plenty of such infringement going on -- so there's little worry that code could be copied and resold without detection.

All of this, though, ignores the reason why I think copyright should apply to code that comes with source. The reason again goes back to the foundation of intellectual property law. The purpose (in the US, at least) of all intellectual property law is to promote progress. An important element of the promotion of progress in the case of copyright is that copyright specifically does not protect the ideas, only the expression. Contrast this with patents, which protect ideas, but require publication of them. Copyright doesn't require publication because the authors of copyright law could not conceive of a situation where an author could simultaneously publish his work and keep the details secret.

But this is exactly what binary-only software makes possible. I can't learn from the techniques used to implement, say, Microsoft Word, to improve my own software, because I don't have access to the source. Yet in spite of this serious obstacle to progress, society still pays for police, courts, prisons, etc., to enforce Microsoft's copyrights. Society pays the full bill, but gets only a small part of the payback.

The obvious solution is to require publication of source in order to obtain copyright protection. That way programmers could learn from the work of others, just as authors can. Not to mention the benefits to security, interoperability and elimination of vendor lock-in.

I never said that creation was cheaper, and it doesn't matter to my argument whether it is or not. However, I think the cases in which creation is more expensive are outnumbered by cases in which it's cheaper.

You beat me to it fair and square. I was going to reply with this: http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0743471873/0743471873.htm from the most excellent online reading source, the Baen Free Library! http://www.baen.com/library/, as it seemed appropriate to the article.

Bad Bolo! Heal boy! Sit Bolo, sit! Ahhhrrrgghhh!

Yes, interesting times: human defined AI+combat machines....it could get VERY interesting before we truly master it- if ever.http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/23/2323214

If my assumption that you are another Kieth Laumer fan, then...well met. If not, I still applaud your timely Bolo reference, and thanks fore the opening for my links! :)

No karma blown, they've never tried one so therefore ebooks/readers must suck.

Yes I like reading processed trees as much as any bibliophile, but I'd really rather carry my Nokia 770 with me. Currently there are 76 books loaded in there from all over the place, Gutenberg, the Baen Free Library, the CIA World Factbook, and more. It was really great on vacation this last Summer. All those endless train rides across Europe and there was no way I was going to pack a half a dozen paperbacks and an equal number of roadmaps for the trip.

I still love my Clie NX70 as an ebook reader. For software I really like iSilo. It only reads its own format (and plain vanilla Palm DOC format) on the device, but the PC-side converter software does an amazingly good job with HTML and CSS. I pull down a number of websites and RSS feeds to read when I'm offline, and I have a large collection of fiction in electronic format (mostly from Baen Books). The converter software comes in GUI flavors for Windows and Mac, and command-line flavors for Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris.

No PDF support, unfortunately, which is probably a killer for a lot of people.

I'm hoping that Santa will be good to me and put a Nokia n810 in my stocking. One of my co-workers has one and it looks like it'd make a double-plus good ebook reader. It's almost exactly the same size as my Clie (the n810 is just a hair shorter), which works well for something to carry with me all the time.

I own a Sony eReader PRS-505. I got it to use mainly when I travel internationally, it's wonderful to carry 10+ hours of reading material in one slim package. I've found that it's also fine for everyday use. I use the USB cable (comes with the reader) to hook up to my WinXP laptop for charging and updating content.

You can get books either through Sony's eBook site or by uploading RTFs and PDFs. (And a few other formats, that I don't use.) I have yet to buy a book from Sony, but I'm a big sci-fi reader so I've downloaded a bunch of stuff from the Baen free library (http://www.baen.com/library/) and other sources.

Technically, I really like the features. The battery life is great, I've used it pretty much non-stop on international flights for 12+ hours and never even saw the battery indicator go down. The viewing area is plenty big, as long as you use the zoom feature properly to expand pages of PDFs. It's easy to switch from one book to another, and to maintain bookmarks.

My only real complaint isn't specifically about the Sony, it's more an industry thing - I wish there was a standard book format. Rocket eBook, Windows CE books, Microsoft reader, Palm format, etc. It gets old seeing all those different formats all the time.

I did see mention above about some other features missing, like a text search. Personally I don't really care about that so it's not an issue for me. Also I've seen folks complain about having to use a computer to get content (rather than wireless like a Kindle), but again it's not an issue for me. I work on my computer all the time, no hardship for me to use it for my reader content.

I have been reading ebooks for years using whatever PDA I have been carrying around (currently: a Palm TX). I have a large library of non-DRM ebooks: a bunch of stuff that's so old it is out of copyright (for example, the Sherlock Holmes stories), and a bunch of Baen ebooks.

I plug Baen every chance I get: they give away some ebooks for free, they sell the others at good prices, they offer multiple formats, and they don't wrap the books in DRM.

Baen Free Library (free ebooks)

Baen books for sale

Most of my reading is ebooks on my PDA now. Any time I have a few minutes to spend (sitting in a waiting room, for example) I can pull out my PDA and read a few more pages. I always have my book with me and it's always at the last page I was reading.

For long airplane trips (like flying to Japan) I still use my old Handspring Visor. The Palm TX is good for maybe four hours on a charge; the Visor is good for dozens of hours with a pair of good AAA cells.

I'm planning to buy an XO mini-laptop, and that should make an excellent ebook reader. Like the Visor, it will be readable in direct sunlight, and will have long battery life. It should be excellent for long airplane flights. It's a lot bigger than a Palm PDA, but it is smaller and lighter than most hard-cover novels.

http://laptopgiving.org/en/index.php

steveha

I have hundreds of books in my home and about a hundred or so ebooks. All the ebooks I have are from the Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) in mobireader format or html format. I used to read on my clie 320x200 resolution all the time before its battery gave out. I am looking for a replacement but it will probably be a iTouch or iPhone. The only reason I have not bought one of those is I would like it to be able to run a ssh client from it as well. What I would really like is an iTouch type tablet with a 5" screen that I can connect to the internet via bluetooth/wifi. I will carry a multi-functional programmable electronic pad with me, but I will not carry a single function book reader, I might as well just carry a book.

I suggest you read Eric Flint's take on this question. He's an author and a strong proponent of DRM-free ebooks. Partly because his principles push him that way but mostly because he's found that publishing his books that way makes more money for him.

The whole essay is well worth your time, but I'll quote his conclusion here:

Flint doesn't attempt to answer the question of how authors will get paid -- except to point out that selling DRM-free e-books is working pretty well for him and others, and that given away some of the books for free has also had a very salutary effect on both electronic and paper book sales -- but his core argument is absolutely correct. As long as there are millions of people who want to give authors money in exchange for good fiction, there will be some way for authors like Flint to make a living.

I used to feel the same way about books, until I started one of the Baen.com ebooks online and found myself reading the whole thing in front of my computer. It turned out that this particular book had a sequel that was also part of the Baen's free library and so I downloaded that too. This time, however, I spent a little bit of time coercing the ebook into the plucker format so that I could read it on my palm.

Next thing I knew I had purchased the entire series, including the final version of the book as a $20 advanced reader copy so that I could get it before it came out in print. What's more, I realized that what I really liked was reading, not books. All of a sudden I saw used book stores for the creepy, smelly places that they really are instead of the magical place of wonder that I had built them up to be in my head.

I liked being able to fit an entire library in my pocket. I liked being able to read in the dark without waking my wife. I liked being able to search my book collection with grep. I liked the fact that I no longer got ink on my hands from a cheap paperback, or had to worry about breaking the spine of a book. Most of all I liked the fact that I no longer had to plan time to read. I always had my palm with me, and so whenever I got a bit of time, even just a few minutes, I could make progress on whatever it was that I was reading. You can't do that with a book, unless you happen to be a security guard.

What's more, even including the price of the pda ($70) I was actually saving money by reading ebooks. I did this by only purchasing unencrypted ebooks, which are generally priced at paperback prices (or less), and by utilizing resources like Project Gutenberg

The real reason that ebooks have not taken off to this point has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the price of ebooks and ebook readers. The Kindle is a perfect example. Seriously, who wants to pay $400 for a dedicated ebook reader? I will grant Amazon.com that the price of the books for the device are mostly reasonable. They are still a little steep, considering the fact that they will be delivered digitally, but not as bad as most ebook vendors. However, $400 will buy a large pile of hardback books.

Eventually, the ebook folks are going to get things right, and that will be that for books. Oh, there will still be some folks that stick to their books in the same way that some music lovers still purchase vinyl, but the mainstream will move on.

Perhaps we could start with trusting and respecting people? Thankfully, Baen has seen fit to try this revolutionary practice of trust. A few other publishers are dipping their toes in the water, as you can see on WebScription, and with luck, this practice will spread to the rest of the industry.

How about this, and this, and even this.

Not exactly the same, of course, and these sites (second one is my server, go easy on it -- the other two links have more stuff anyway) are pretty much limited to the production of one publisher, because that's the only publisher around so far that understands DRM-free ebooks and lax policies on sharing are good for their business. But others are exploring the ideas (look at the list of publishers).

Baen would seem to disagree. Conveniently, this means I can now dump all my old webscriptions onto my new Kindle.

Not all publishers like DRM. Take a look at http://www.baen.com/library/ Baen Publishing's Free Library or you can go to their Webscription site and buy ebooks in multiple formats and without DRM.

That would be another wonderful feature, a true electronic library that doesn't cost you per month.

Yeah. Somebody should try that some time.

+ Reader has to be under $100.

How about free? Provided, of course, that you provide your own Blackberry, Palm, Smarter-Than-Thou-Phone, PC or other geek-faux-wang. If you don't already have one you can probably find something acceptable at or near your $100 price point. It won't have the big e-Paper screen that the Kindle does, but I have no troubles using a smaller display.

* Books have to be half the price of print books or lower.

e-Book pricing is all over the place right now, with titles ranging anywhere from free, free, or free, all the way to about the same as printed books. As the market grows expect to see more pressure on prices which should force things down a bit, but don't hold your breath.

+ No bullshit DRM. I better be able to back the content up, copy it to my ipod, save it on my hard drive. Whatever.

Some books ship with bullshit included while others come pas-des-merde-des-vasche. With a good reader you can feed it anything from flat ASCII text, HTML or PDF files through to insanely encrypted tracts of bull and have something readable come out the other end. The choice is yours.

+ I better be able to resell it, just like I can resell a used book. Otherwise, all of this is just a run-around way for the publishing industry to attacked the used book trade, which they hate more than almost anything else on earth (including their loathing of public libraries).

Yes, you can absolutely resell the hardware that you read books on just like you resell a used book. Reselling _data_ is a trickier problem, as it is nothing like a used book. Besides, the only way for second hand ebooks to have any value would be if they included "Bullshit DRM". Which do you want, resale or steerpoopage?

and running them on my ~$100 Palm Zire 31. In fact, that's how I usually buy fiction. And since most of my leisure reading is SF, I get DRM-free downloads from Baen Books. I can also convert documents most major formats into something readable via Palm.

http://www.baen.com/ sell reasonably priced ebooks and have some free (as in beer) ones. Good start for an SF library, we just need a few more publishers* to follow that example.

... and, of course, for this new device to be able to accept them.

* a good start would be one that does detective stories - that itself might be sufficient to bootstrap ebooks to a larger audience.

One last unrelated thing: I see everyone talking about DRM'd ebooks. I have never bought a DRM'd ebook in my life and never will. I buy my books from baen.com (ALL completely DRM free and in several formats) which has -years- of good books that I don't have yet, and they release more each month than I can read in a month.

Amen to Baen! Darned near all of their catalog is available electronically (certainly everything printed in the past decade), they have a huge library of free books, and everything is available in plain ol' HTML as well as other forms (Rocketreader, Palm Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, and RTF). Individual books are priced about the same as a paperback, cheaper if you buy the bundle-of-the-month.

They also publish a monthly SF magazine in a purely electronic format, if that sort of thing floats your boat.

Baen has a serious corporate allergy to DRM. Jim Baen hated it, and his successors hate it. This is what commercial electronic media should be. (I'm talking to you, RIAA!)

I don't have mod points or I'd have used them on that article.

We're moving closer and closer to the universal invisible media network that's been a staple of SF for decades (the earliest story containing a recognizable world computer network that I've been able to find is Murray Leinster's A Logic named Joe currently available online from Baen Books). As early as 1975 the universal media net was a central part of John Brunner's seminal Shockwave Rider and the much-delayed Dr. Adder by K W Jeter that would have beaten it into print if it hadn't squicked the editors... and later by the novels of William Gibson and Vernor Vinge and others...

And don't dismiss this idea just because it's "science fiction". SF writers are perpetually trolling academia and acting as a channel between academia, industry, and the public: SF is the "glue logic" between technology and culture. The notion of the universal media net became popular in SF because it was becoming seen as inevitable and (usually) desirable by the people who were, one way or another, making it happen. While SF is often radically wrong in detail, and many popular SF visions will never come true, when you can watch them happening around you it's definitely time to pay attention.

And exactly how is she damaged by this? It can only help to increase exposure of her book.

Right. And being an author who has other books in the Baen free library, there are probably few people more aware of this than she is. But that doesn't mean that her publishers should get a free pass to do what they want with her book.

I know David Weber is not ever going to win any awards for "great literature," but dang it if the man's books (especially the Dahak series) aren't a lot of fun to read.

Sam

Or you can get a ton of them for free, legally:

http://www.baen.com/library/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Information isn't just for pirates any more.

You could go a step further and conceive a world in which not only servers, but even things we take for granted, such as a hard drive or DVD-R disc, would be regulated.

Why not hear it from several authors, from one publisher:

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

Several authors use older releases as bait to tempt you to buy more recent books.

Project Gutenberg is concerned mostly with old, out of copyright books, author usually long dead. Many of these books would be unavailable otherwise.

There's an excelent GPL program for Palm OS: Palm Fiction. It doesn't need any conversion programs, it can read plain .txt, .html, .rtf files, also in .zip or .gz compression, straight from the memory card. I used it on m500, Tungsten T3, TX and now on Treo 650 and I'm glad I've found it. The UI is so much configurable, I sometimes consider it a drawback.

The only thing Palm Fiction lacks IMO is webpage and documentation in English ;)

Of course it doesn't read any proprietary, encrypted formats, but since I've got Baen free and commercial offerings, as well as MLDonkey I can't complain. I just feel sorry for the publishers that don't want to take my money and thank the authors for their hard work in such cases.

Robert

One the only relevent complaint is the Fair Use issue*

Not true. What about backups? What about library reproductions? What about transfer of ownership (some DRM tools disallow this)? What about time and format shifting (not explicitly allowed by law, but certainly well within the realm of what a reasonable law should allow, and previously effectively permitted for non-commercial use)?

Oh, and you can't blithely ignore expiration, just because it hasn't happened yet. The fact is that DRM enables perpetual copyright, not to mention any other random restriction that DRM authors choose to implement. One rather sad example is electronic books that disallow the use of screen readers for the blind.

If you were faced with rampent piracy of something you were producing and people were flagrently flaunting the law. What would you do?

Oh, I imagine I'd kick and scratch to try to preserve my business model. I'd like to think that I'd be high-minded enough to accept that the world has changed, and that I have to find another way of doing business, but I probably wouldn't. Human nature.

However, the opinions of copyright holders are irrelevant, and we need to keep that in mind. To understand this, you really need a deeper understanding of the history and purpose of copyright. It isn't, and never was, intended to benefit creators, but society. And if you go back to the original writings on the topic, it wasn't even so much intended to encourage creation, because it was understood that creation would happen regardless. The primary purpose of copyright is to fund distribution, because publication used to be expensive and it was understood that creators built upon the ideas of one another, that publication begets creation.

The world has changed, however, and publication is cheaper than it ever has been. In fact, publication is now basically free. Not only that, in many ways creation is cheaper than it has ever been, and because of the massive scale of the audience can be reached, less revenue per reader/watcher/listener is required to keep a creator fed, clothed and housed. This all means that in a correctly-functioning system, congress should right now be scaling back the scope and duration of copyright in order to maintain the balance between public expense and public benefit.

Note that there are people out there who understand the new world, and are profiting from it. They still use copyright, but they use it only to quash large-scale piracy, and they not only permit but embrace sharing. Musicians like Jonathan Coulton are finding they can make a very decent living by performing and selling songs from their web site, with no DRM at all. Baen books has vastly increased its sales, and its authors incomes, by not only selling non-DRM'd copies on-line, but by giving a way a large selection of novels, complete and unabridged, for FREE. Moviemakers have always made most of their money from public performances, and have less need to worry about the changes.

The net taketh away, but the net also giveth, though perhaps not as much. For example, Musicians in the new reality probably won't become millionaires. Rather, they'll go back to doing what they have since time immemorial, performing for a living. As a friend of mine pointed out, taking away their ability to kill themselves with Ferraris and heroin may be a good thing for the creation of music.

The issue you point out is real, but the solution you favor is 180 degrees opposed to the public interest. As Eric Flint (author), pointed out:

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 indi

I'd love it if I could go back to ebooks, but I will not until they fix (or eliminate) their horrible DRM scheme.

I am a very satisfied customer of Baen ebooks. Baen does it right.

You can download in any or all of five different formats: HTML, RTF, Palm ebook, Rocket ebook, or Microsoft ebook. The book is not under any sort of DRM. They have all their new releases, not just some weird out of print titles. And they have a deal where you can buy 5 or 6 books at a time for $15!

That latter deal they call "Webscriptions". If you buy a really new book, the webscription might include only part of the book. Over time, more of the book is revealed, and finally the whole book is available. But as long as you are buying a Webscription monthly selection that is old enough (which is most of them) you get all the books at once.

And, I believe they are still doing the deal where you buy a monthly Webscription selection and you can give a Webscription selection to a friend. You do this by providing them with the friend's email address, so check with the friend to make sure he or she is cool with giving out the email address. (I made a test email account on my server, and gifted it with a monthly selection; it has never received any spam, so I believe Baen when they say they do not give out your email address to spammers.)

I have spent over $300 at Baen, and my collection of Baen ebooks is up to 200 books! That includes titles from the "free library". Yes, Baen also just plain gives away some ebooks.

Baen free library:
http://www.baen.com/library/

ebooks, and monthly Webscription selections:
http://www.webscription.net/

Here are a few free ebooks to get you going. These are some of my favorites; perhaps you might like them too.

The best of Keith Laumer's classic "Retief" stories!
http://www.webscription.net/pc-347-1-retief.aspx

A book in the style of the old "pulp" novels, with magic and mad science thrown in.
http://www.webscription.net/pc-110-1-doc-sidhe.asp x

Humans stranded on a planet with large intelligent large molluscs. The humans need help just to digest the local food, but they can do some things the locals cannot, also.
http://www.webscription.net/pc-287-1-mother-of-dem ons.aspx

The first of the "Honor Harrington" series, and my favorite of them.
http://www.webscription.net/pc-304-1-on-basilisk-s tation.aspx

I hope you will enjoy reading some of these ebooks!

steveha

They should contract with Baen. All of their stuff is already in platform-neutral e-book formats, and I'll bet they'd just love to load a significant chunk of their catalog on planes for long flights. Few flights are long enough to actually finish a novel, so they'd probably lots of paperback sales to people who read most of a good book and want to finish it. Maybe allow you to read on the plane for free, and then offer you a chance to enter your mailing address and credit card to buy the paperback and have it shipped so you could finish it.

See my reply here.

Also, I would argue (am arguing) that the drive to create is separate from the drive for money. There would still be artists if creating art was punishable by death, it has nothing to do with making money.

The connection between creating art and becoming rich and famous was propagated by the middle men who looked at artists and said, "You know, I could really make a killing by distributing this." That is capitalism.

Now that we are in the "Digital Age" and distribution can be widespread and done by anyone, the middle-men are threatened and are reacting, sometimes by adapting to the new technology, sometimes by suing everyone in sight.

The ideal solution would be to find a way to reward artists, without restricting the distribution of art. That is the goal, remember?

Let me take a moment to point you towards Baen Books. They not only sell current books online, they sell them in an couple open formats (html, rtf), as well as some that aren't so open (Rocket, Palm, MS Reader). They even have a section for free books. If you like their material, support them by buying their books. If you don't like ebook formats, buy hard copy. They'll still appreciate your service. This is the most forward-thinking of the traditional publishers (the founder was in the business for over 35 years - traditional enough for me). I'm not surprised of the genre they're in. They're even getting traction with other sci-fi/fantasy publishers, like Del Rey and Tor.

Let me take a moment to point you towards Baen Books. They not only sell current books online, they sell them in an couple open formats (html, rtf), as well as some that aren't so open (Rocket, Palm, MS Reader). They even have a section for free books. If you like their material, support them by buying their books. If you don't like ebook formats, buy hard copy. They'll still appreciate your service. This is the most forward-thinking of the traditional publishers (the founder was in the business for over 35 years - traditional enough for me). I'm not surprised of the genre they're in. They're even getting traction with other sci-fi/fantasy publishers, like Del Rey and Tor.

I am surprised nobody mentioned Melancholy Elephants http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___ 1.htm as a response to this.. I really think this should be read as a bed-time story for every would-be politician, just to keep on the safe side.

They're available for free from the Baen Free Library as well.

I've also bought way more music online that I ever did on CD (I hate trying to find stuff in record stores, especially since my tastes aren't mainstream). That didn't stop the music industry from totally flipping out over the idea of digital sales, and just think about what they did to free online music. I think you overestimate the average corporation if you think they would realize that libraries would be good for them in the long run. They would just see someone using their tax dollars to let people read books for free, the books they are trying to sell.

You also see this with ebooks. Most of the major publishers have tried ebooks at one point or another. In all but one case, they want you to pay more (you have to buy the reader at least), for less (lots and lots of onerous DRM). Only one company is making any money on ebooks, and it's the one that doesn't have DRM at all.

Are you kidding? Many book publishers happily give away no-longer-published materials online anymore (Baen Books, for instance, has Baen Free Library at http://www.baen.com/library/ ) ... I've become a huge Mercedes Lackey fan after being exposed to this, and have since purchased many of her books.

I prefer reading printed books but don't have room for very many on my bookshelf , so to save space, ebooks are a good alternative. I have sometimes had to throw out old books to make room for new ones. Of course, I always felt guilty doing that, but I did not know what else to do with them. Instead of doing that, I could easily fit an entire library of many thousands of books on one small hard drive. There are may older books, in which the copyrights have expired, as well as some occasional newer books which for various reasons are available in ebook form for free.

• Project Gutenberg
• Arthur's Classic Novels
• ManyBooks.net
• Baen Free Library
• Cory Doctorow's Free Books

I do buy occasional newer printed books too, which are not available for free, so I am still doing my share of helping to support the publishing industry.

http://www.baen.com/

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___ 1.htm