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An interesting side effect of the Baen Free Library - it has indirectly contributed to my buying a Sony Clie and a 256 mb compactflash card, just so I can store my books to read on the go when traveling. What happened? I downloaded one book by David Weber to start off (Mutineer's Moon) after reading about the free library on Slashdot. One thing led to another, and I became the owner of War of Honor, and later Hell's Faire, both of which have CD's containing a bunch of eBooks, completely free.

In addition to the random selection from the free library, I can now take advantage of Project Gutenberg titles, and I've been seriously considering signing up for Webscriptions just so I can get first crack at some of the new titles coming out.

So, more digital media for free not only helps to boost sales of physical copies (I also bought dead-tree versions of Sluggy Freelance as well - I got hooked on Sluggy after reading obscure references in John Ringo's "When the Devil Dances" and visiting the Sluggy website trying to figure out who "Torg", "Zoe", "Riff", and "Bun-Bun" were.)

So, just from trying out one free eBook, I went ahead and have bought:

(2) Hardcover books from Baen, new

(7) Softcover Sluggy Freelance books from Plan Nine Publishing

(1) Clie NX60 [320x480 screen, a bit small, but very legible]

And a 256mb compactflash card [overkill, until you start putting MP3s on it]

That's several hundred dollars of spending on my part, and it cost Baen about 15mb worth of bandwidth for all the books that I've downloaded from the free library. For me, it's a great deal - lots of books for very little money. For Baen and their authors, it's a great deal - they get new customers (I never would have tried David Weber otherwise - now he's one of my favorite authors), and lots of good press (ie, Slashdot and word of mouth.) Incidentally, this happens with titles I check out from the library (I like a book or author, and end up buying books to add to my personal library), so there's preceedent for the sharing of "free" media.

TradeWars Gold aka TW2002

http://plan9.org/tw2002.html

As a proud owner of the first book I can say it is quite nice to be able to take BOFH with you anywhere you go (aside from the ones on your PDA). The books, both I and II can be purchased from Plan 9 Publishing from THISpage. Enjoy your reading, and remember only use one excuse card a day! (don't want to run out before the end of the year)

OctaneZ
BOfH Administrator

A short list:

• Bill Holbrook (Three comics, including Kevin & Kell)
• T. K. Dye (Newshounds)
• Pete Abrams (Sluggy Freelance)
• Illiad (User Friendly)

Once again, Sluggy Freelance has been passed over in an online article/discussion about comics. It has everything that Salon is bringing up as salient points: long story arcs (not quite as long as the mentioned College Roomies from Hell, but they do intersect and elements from previous arcs come back in later ones), micro-payments, the ability for the artist to make the majority of his money off of it (witness the actual bound books available through Plan 9 Publishing, as well as the assorted "goodies" you can buy), and solid artwork (those who've read Gaiman's Sandman may notice some influence in the often-hauntingly-beautiful The Bug, the Witch, and the Robot story arc may see some similarities)...

Why does it seem that Sluggy has become an online-comics pariah these days? User Friendly gets bashed for being too pro-geek (or whatever), which may or may not be a valid criticism. But Sluggy is just getting forgotten? What gives?

You can also get all of these books (and others) directly from Plan 9. They give the authors more royalties for those sales.

Also, if you're going to start reading Sluggy Freelance, I highly recommend you start from the first strip. Everything makes so much more sense that way.

That's a lot of time invested.

Although some enterprising companies like Plan Nine have been selling dead tree editions of some of the best on-line comics, that's still very low wages for a lot of artwork.

I provide you this challenge: how could an Internet cartoonist make money from their website?

http://www.plan9.org/

Robert Wright