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Free Books: Under the Radar
bcrowell writes "Remember e-books, anti-books, and print-on-demand books? They didn't pan out. The surprise success story is free books." Of course, this defines "success" as number of readers, not in terms of monetary profits. E-books and their ilk were concentrating on the latter definition, rather than the former. Still, it's good to see free books preferred in some circles based on their merit, and not just the cost.
Bruce Eckel has all of his "Thinking in" books available in pdf format on his webpage. You can also buy the hardbound version in local bookstores. So you can have your cake and eat it too. It seems like he's pretty successful in his method, too.
I, personally, own a copy of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++, and recommend it to all Java/C++ programmers. Check it out on the website, and buy a copy if you like it.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
From the article:
. Book publishers like Baen and O'Reilly, however, have found that they can increase sales of their printed books by giving away the digital versions for free. This has also been my own experience with my self-published physics textbooks. It's cheap marketing: readers can browse the digital book to see if it's something they want, and if they like it, they're willing to pay for the convenience of a printed copy.
Strangely, the author fails to link to the Baen Free Library: http://www.baen.com/library/
It's funny. Publishers are starting to get what Microsoft has known for a while. 'Piracy' is in reality free advertising. Why don't the record companies and movie studios get it?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Eckel gets it.
Here's more gratis books. Site 1 | Site 2 (Math)
His Travels With Samantha was one of the first online free books ever, circa 1992-3. Later, he wrote the stupendous book on web publishing, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing with his samoyed, Alex.
Two very good reads by a very good writer. Sorry, I know some people don't like Philip and this isn't flamebait -- I truly admire many of his initiatives, like the free Remindme and Clickthrough services, in addition to the remarkable photo.net which has grown enormous tentacles nowadays. Both books are intimately related to those efforts.
Also, if you read nothing else of command line, you at least to fully understand the OS marketplace, must read the car dealer chapter. No other explanation has ever come closer to home than this to perfectly illustrating the operating system market and the relation of the respective systems.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Funny that no one has mentionned Project Gutenberg so far. If you don't know what they do, check it out here.
Many free (as in speech) books are available on dead tree (for a fee), the same way you can get the latest Linux distro without downloading.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
It's not much of a collection right now, but the quality level is high. Especially good is 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist', a good introduction to programming that lives up to the title. It covers several languages.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
So how's that affecting Dover's business (Dover produces no new titles, apart from original translations of non-copyrighted work)? They're booming.
Heck, with those sort of results, Dover ought to be providing financial support for PG (or at least releasing edited/translated titles into the public domain). Though I guess I'll settle for that nice brief they filed in Eldred's behalf.
Slight disclaimer here, Dover was bought by a big printing company that's really helped them with distribution (just came back from the beach and all the little bookstores there were well-stocked with Dover thrifts), but every other publisher on the planet has seen sales fall, while Dover's sales, since the acquisition, have grown tremendously.
Well, it's not entirely true that community writing doesn't pan out. The author mentions Nupedia as a failed effort, but there are many examples of places where this kind of "group writing" has worked very well.
The best I can think of is Everything. I spend many hours reading the stuff there every week. Though it cannot be called an encyclopedia by any stretch of imagination, I've found it to be a very valuable source of general contemporary info.
Then there's the Encyclopedia Mythica.
Someone just mentioned Project Gutenberg too. It's a community effort that's coming out very well indeed. I know that it's not not community authorship, but a community effort.
There are many more counter-examples I can provide. Hell, even the usenet archives are a very useful source of info sometimes.
Community writing should not be written off (pardon the pun) lightly.
All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.
It seems to me that most of the free books mentioned on this thread are sci-fi, and popular fiction. It is by virtue of this fact that these dispersion methods for books have not caught on more. The more popular the book, the more likely one is to charge for it. Perhaps we ought to start organizing things in the public domain, and things like classics, technical works, etc, that are more likely to be thought of as "free". Make these books accessible, and create a good interface, to show proof of concept in terms of readers and the bigger guys may come around, at least to publishing on and off-line works (the online versions being free or very cheap). Here are my links to some stellar classics archives. Aside from some of the more obscure math and science works, I believe my whole school's curriculum is available for free on the web:
Perseus Project
Great Books Index
The Internet Classics Archive
Bartleby
Enjoy these free reads. They are the greatest books ever written.
I found this awhile back by linking back from a Google search. I was pleasantly surprised to a) learn of its existence and b) find it being offered for free. For those of you into tales of hacking/cracking this is a good read that keeps me 'scared whitehat'. http://www.underground-book.com/ It's strange how much is out there out there in terms of free literature and documentation, but the only unified, exhaustive index is Google. :P
The books are in DjVu format (viewer for Linux available here).
For example, I wanted to quote that great pseudo-riddle from Lewis Carroll -- "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" But which Alice book did it come from? In two minutes I found both text files at Gutenberg, searched for "raven", and there it was. (The Mad Hatter came up with it, in _Alice in Wonderland_. )
The Internet is, IMO, the best free ebook--it sure is the biggest. Unlike dead tree books, you get a wide choice of search engines. Of course, you can pick up a lot of weird stuff there too. So, surf safely--I myself always wear a condom.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
Is that you're computer screen has very crappy resolution compared to the resolution on a piece of paper. When computer screen's are 300dpi like decent printers, then reading stuff on them will be much more fun.
Until then, the thing to do is offer books in pdf and html format. PDF to print out. HTML to read on the computer, which will allow you to change font settings and sizes to your preference, making it easier to read.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The problem is that though ClearType looks great subjectively it gives me a massive headache on my 17" ViewSonic VA800 LCD screen if I leave it on for a day or two of heavy computer use, even after I "tuned" it. I haven't set it up on a PDA and tried reading a Gutentext or other ebook because of that (well, and cuz I got rid of my PocketPC device and am back to a Clie for now... doh).
Luckily there are still some immediate options if you are one of the many who *know* about Project Gutenberg etexts (for those of us whose taste in books, e- and otherwise is somewhat antiquated) but have never actually *read* one due to their well, umm, rather plain text look and feel. In particular GutenMark should do the trick. So download a couple of GutenTexts and GutenMark them into PDF/PS and you have something you might not exactly be able to curl up with, but at least it's readable.
However, they also seem to be contributing to this disturbing trend of ``un-freeing'' free books. This book used to be free at the author's web page. If you click on the link, you'll find that it no longer exists. The book is no longer free, and you can only get the electronic version through Safari.
Find free books.