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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.
In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. If you haven't already read it, it's basicaly a history of operating systems and why they are how they are, intertwined with metaphors on how what parts work and a breakdown of OS/GUI variations and such. His stuff is way better than my explanation. It's free...so download it instead of listen to me ramble. If you hate it, the most you've lost is the time you took to DL and read what told you that. Also available in print.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I know lots of people who read both free and e-books.. but that's not why I haven't taken it on, and why I believe the market hasn't taken off either. Reading a book on the computer screen is the pits. Lots of technology has been promised to fix this, but where are the commercial products?
I glad to see free books are doing well, but I'm not going to read one.
Rob(ert) #3
I have to admit I take a certain joy in seeing that a whole book on fields is a mere 3 Meg download.
It would be nice if we also had something like free literary universes. I mean, you could write fiction which would add to an existing universe and its storylines. In the mentioned article, they touch the subject of open-source books. Although there's some intriguing thought there, I don't think the issue is taken broadly. It seems the original article doesn't focus in any specific book genre, but I think it's safe to assume it deals more specifically to reference books, not literary books. Any further thoughts on this?
My neighbor's
I really love the safari service at oreilly. You can basically check out 5 books for 10$ per month. Pretty nice, because I really love oreilly books, but couldn't afford to buy hard copies of them all. Unfortunately, the bastard company that runs this has a pretty crappy pricing model (automatic billing, and when you cancel your account, it is inactive immediately rather than at the end of the billing period).
Still, I think this is a good compromise, in the same way that if artists sold their cd's online for a reasonabele amount of money, people would be less tempted to pirate their respective work.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Orson Scott Card (author of Ender's Game) has posted a copy of his short story Angles for free on his website . He also wrote an interesting piece about copyright back in May of this year. An interesting quote:
He also routinely puts up the first few chapters of his books online, before they're published so you can get a taste of them before buying. I'm surprised more people don't have this attitude.Some people will be interested in BookCrossing.
From the site: "What is BookCrossing, you ask? It's a global book club that crosses time and space. It's a reading group that knows no geographical boundaries. Do you like free books? How about free book clubs?. Well, the books our members leave in the wild are free... but it's the act of freeing books that points to the heart of BookCrossing. Book trading has never been more exciting, more serendipitous, than with BookCrossing. Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library. BookCrossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind."
How to Download YouTube Videos
Well, I kinda with I had my $40, but I was glad in the end to have paid for it. Kudos to O'Reilly, Alessandro Rubini and Jonathan Corbet for doing it, like I need another reason to like O'Reilly. I hope examples like these will encourage others to do the same, after all, free software can be close to useless without documentation.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Now, I must say that I have several e-books on my Visor and that works out just great when I go to lunch and want to read something while I eat. But I certainly wouldn't want to try to relax in bed at night while trying to read that tiny print on a dark screen. So I think what we have here is the idea of a new technology which is still valid, but the implementation of that technology hasn't caught up with the idea. Give me a cheap e-book reader the size and weight of a paperback book with high quality fonts on a readable background with enough memory to hold a couple dozen books and e-books would be seriously take off!
Yes, and that is the incentative!
It's frustrating seeing all these objections to the format. Much of the point of these free books is to get people hooked and get them to buy the real thing, right? Right?
It's not dead-tree _versus_ electronic. It's dead-tree _in addition to_ electronic. That's the key.
The electronic version; cheap, not as comfortable to read, good for searching/citing.
dead-tree version; expensive, very comfortable to read, not made for searching, looks good on shelf.
See how they complement each other?
I love the free books out there. I think it's brilliant. I've read Eckels material and I've recommended it to many many people based on the "check out the electronic version". I hope he's doing well.
The format issue notwithstanding, one great point is reader interaction and feedback. Publishing during the drafting period seems like a good way to get extra proofing and feedback, which makes for a better product, and better products sell more (music excepted :-o)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I have the feeling that palm-held devices are becoming the most widely-used platforms for e-books, not computers with their monitors. Owning a Sony Clie, I have't read a paper-based book for over a year now. In fact, my eyes adjust to the small screen better than to printed books.
By getting this story to slashdot, I wonder how many additional books they will find. I don't really understand what the author is saying about open source software never replacing proprietary software and becoming #1 for a particular use. What about apache, perl, and a boatload of other best in class open source software apps?
I like having a physical book. I like being able to make marks on pages, put sticky notes on pages that I can feel on turn to, have the book in my hand, take it where I want to and it never needs electricty.
Sure, some people may like it. But that's why a free market is so great. You can use what you like. I also learned in a technical writing class that reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from a book. My own experience tells me this is true as well.
I am totally unsurprised that the non-free eBook market is languishing. The other day I go to Amazon to look for a new book. The hardcover edition was on sale for $18. The digital eBook was $21. This kind of greed (eBooks are arguably less expensive to distribute and have almost no chance of being re-read in a secondary market) is why the established publishers are in for a hard lesson in reality. Same goes with music, etc, etc...
The Assayer appears to be partially slashdotted right now. It's still serving up static HTML, but it won't let you use any of the CGIs, so you can't browse the database, read reviews, sign on as a member, or write reviews right now. That's a shame, since I ended the article with a plea for reviews! I hope people will try back later when the server is able to handle the load. Lots of people have already posted here on Slashdot about their favorite free books, and it would be great if they could put reviews on The Assayer eventually.
Find free books.
A great place for free book is over at www.andamooka.org
It has some great books there, although some may be outdated
Hey, this is my sig, if you don't like it, STOP READING MY POSTS!
at least two of [these free books] [4],[5] seem to be the standard textbooks in their field today
Reference 4 is by no means the standard textbook in the field of biophysics. I've been in the field for at least 6 years and this is the first I've heard of this book. None of my professors have ever mentioned it either.
Microsoft can't just say, "Romeo and Juliet was a big success for Shakespeare, so we'll write something similar."
Doesn't this happen all the time? Isn't West Side Story just Romeo and Juliet again? Isn't any star-crossed lover movie that women flock and drag their men to a remake of Romeo and Juliet? Wasn't the Leonardo DiCrapio remake an embraced and extended version of R&J?
Books, however, are easy to use, and most computer users know how to use an electronic book that is in the ubiquitous (and nonproprietary) Adobe Acrobat format.
Isn't pdf proprietary?
Finally, a story on free literature that doesn't link the asstr is not complete by any means :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Looming on the horizon instead, with every prospect of success, were the "anti-books:" electronic books encumbered with {odious licensing terms} and {restrictive digital rights management technology.[2]} You wouldn't be able to loan such a book to a friend, public libraries couldn't acquire it, and if you stopped paying your rental fee, it would expire and become unreadable! "
That sounds exactly like Safari (which I am currently a member of). The {} may or may not apply. The only digital rights management there exists is that which will make it very inconvenient to say print the entire book out. I believe Safari is a success and does not include only O'Reilly books. It is a lot cheaper than buying a book, for access to a few.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Free books are a good idea, but will face the same struggle as OSS, primarily because of the monopolies already existing. MS we all know about, but how many of you good people here tonight know the extent of the Bertelsmann firm's media dominance? It's the only Big Six corp not to have a key US TV outlet, and that (AFAIK) is because the US has laws to make sure all US TV is by American corporations, and Bertelsmann is German.
To cut a long story short, the Big Corps will do anything and everything to wipe out "free books", or at the very least, prevent their gaining a significant market share. In terms of styles of books, the mass markets will be catered for, so free books will fill the unprofitable/undesirable topics that publishers will not touch. They will also be quite a few people releasing books for free as a statement, like the morons who struggle to use Linux just because its "cool", aparrently. Finally, the genuineley intelligent books whose authors really are in it for the spirit of it, the virtually unread minority, drowned under the crapflooders whose crap has no profit for the big publishing houses and no worth to the independent publishers.
In short, this could, and hopefully will, be a force for good in the literature arena. Until the lawyers move in...
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
It depends on the book. For most books, it is not possible to print it yourself at a price lower than what it costs at a bookstore. For instance, a paperback novel at $7 is cheaper than the paper and ink cartridges you'd need to pay for to print it on an inkjet printer. Also, if you print it yourself, you're getting an inferior product: it's single-sided, and it's not bound.
The main exception I'm aware of is overpriced college textbooks. For example, my own free textbook is aimed at a market (introductory physics without calculus) where the standard price is $120. The price of do-it-yourself printing is more like $60, and it's no coincidence that if you buy a [rinted copy of my 6-volume set from me, the price adds up to a little more than $60.
Find free books.
I dunno about the rest of you, but I wasn't going to buy a rocketbook or any of the others so that I could pay a bunch of money to download books over a slow-as-molasses modem. Why the heck can't I download them over my broadband connection to my PC and maintain my own library? And I wasn't going to buy books that I could only read on my PC, which I don't happen to be sitting in front of at any time when I want to be reading books.
I want to read books wherever I am, like you'd be able to do with a dedicated ebook reader, but I don't want to pay for or carry around a dedicated ebook reader.
As it turns out, I've been carrying a portable computer since early 1997 - a palm. So why not use that? The screen is small, but I always have it with me, and its print is really not all that much smaller than a lot of paperbacks anyway.
I thought that was a natural fit. I started reading ebooks on it in I think 1998, but certainly by the end of 1999. Back then there were only a few places you could get them, and peanutpress was the only place I could get contemporary stuff from well-known authors (plus the peanut reader did a very nice display job given the limitations of the device).
Since that time the number of ebook vendors has exploded. I still can't get them from Barnes and Noble or Amazon in a palm reader format (isn't it interesting that both support Microsoft's format but neither supports the much more popular palm reader format) but there has been an explosion of free and commercial ebook services serving the palmtop market. My current favorite is fictionwise.
Anyway, my point in all of this is that ebooks are selling commercially and have been selling for years. Not on high volumes, but I wonder if that's not because of the failure of the large booksellers to target the largest of the palmtop markets. The smaller vendors have existed for years and are obviously doing something right given that they're still around and their inventories are exploding, but they don't have the marketing push to really get ebooks out there.
Whatever, ebooks really are here if you want them and most likely you don't have to buy anything extra to read them.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
We all know there is "book warez" out there, along with hacked versions or ebook readers. Still, instead of filling the greedy with money, we ought to look at a richer source of information: Gutenberg Library.
.lockout formats. They use text with a copyright warning at the beginning. The are truley free. The library may be quite old though...
;-)
They don't use
Still I've got this idea talking about this. Gutenberg has "how many documents?"... Add the amount of space (uncompressed) to a database like MySql along with a web interface. Also have some way of grepping text inside all those files. Slap it al together using Linux, and you now have a "Library Server". That one server could be put under a desk or wherever and have web interfaces to it. Even the medium-small librarys could legitly quadruple thier colllections fo books, wether it be dead tree or electronic.
Thinking of that, I just might do that..... I bet the library would pay a bif for the setup like that. Get a decent machine like a 1.4 Athlon with 1 gig of ram. Depending on the load, you might be able to store everything Gzipped.
Just a thought from a crazy
I claim DRM will fail for similar reasons to 'anti-books' as they are called. If what they do (with DRM) to a CD or DVD to make it uncopyable, and usable on exactly one computer also makes it less usable on standard audio and video hardware, I think they could lose it all very quickly. As long as the average consumer can use the media he bought in any number of players (including old ones), they have a chance of selling them. But if DRM means you lose the right of first sale property, which includes the right to lend the media to a friend and such, the average joe will quickly reject this junk.
There is also a growing number of people that won't buy it unless they retain basic fair use copying rights. I'm one of them, as are a lot of people on slashdot. I don't have any MP3 or Ogg devices yet, but I'm likely to convert my entire music collection to this type of system in the next five years (give or take). I'm quite confident that there will be enough material that doesn't have these ridiculous restrictions that I won't feel I'm missing anything, and frankly if an artist lets their work get released in this way, I don't need them.
Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay was originally written as a criticism of the small-group centralized way that Stallman and his team develop GNU Emacs.
This fact seems to have largely been swept under the carpet, it is dismaying how many people think it's an anti-Microsoft essay. It was a polemic within the open source community.
For the MPAA, I think it is different as the barriers to entry are pretty high for motion pictures. They don't like their own DVD products cutting into theature box office, so maybe they really are more concerned with piracy. At current bandwidth, I'd be surprised if P2P style exchanges are really that big of a problem for them, but mass produced grey market sales of actual discs probably is. They should be able to attack this problem without pissing off customers with restrictive DRM, but they seem to be heading down the wrong path.
Joke if you want, but I can fill in 2 for you:
1. free books
2. free books act as gateway drug for non-free ebooks.
3. PROFIT!!!
It happened to me. When paperbacks started costing > 9 dollars, I stopped buying them. It hurt to decrease my favorite entertainment, but with my scifi/fantasy appetite of 2-4 paperbacks a weekend, I just couldn't afford it.
Then I heard fictionwise was giving away hugo and nebula award nominees. How could I resist? I downloaded them all. After spending a happy hour tweaking Weasel Reader, I settled in with my Palm to devour some words.
I was like the recovered junky, who, having one hit, falls deep into addiction again. But I still wasn't going to pay 9 bucks for a paperback, or worse, the same amount for an ebook. I trolled Project Gutenberg, Baen, OReilly look for a good read. That held off the monkey on my back for a little while. Still I needed more. So I went back to fictionwise, credit card in hand, looking for my fix. I discovered that unlike some ebookstores (cough,cough Peanut Press) not all ebooks were overpriced, DRM'd e-versions of last years NYT bestseller list. fictionwise has TONS of great novels cheap. Real cheap. In text format. Did I mention cheap? And even better: novellas, short stories, serials, all manner of quickie escapism that fit perfectly into the time it takes to ride the bus, or watch your clothes dry.
So now I'm hooked on cheapie short stories from fictionwise. On Friday nights I used to go down to the Blockbuster and rent 9 dollars worth of DVDs for my weekend entertainment. Now I spend a fun hour browsing an ebookstore, and for 4 dollars (0.30 - 1.50 each) I download a half-dozen good stories to fill my free time.
Raymond described a model of collaborative software development in which a large, geographically dispersed group of programmers worked together in a seemingly chaotic way. This bazaar model was to be contrasted with the cathedral model, in which everything is done according to a detailed, preexisting plan.
[...]
The bazaar model seems to have been almost a complete failure in the world of free books, although not for want of trying. Tellingly, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was itself written cathedral-style by Raymond. He has also started a bazaar-style book project, The Art of Unix Programming[7], which appears to be languishing.
[...]
The failure of the bazaar model with free books might not seem surprising
This depends largely on where one draws the line between bizzar and cathedral, or put another way, with what granularity one considers a project or body of work. The Star Trek and Star Wars universes are examples where there is a large body of Cathedralesque work, as well as an even larger body of "fan fiction." While many stories (perhaps most) are themselves written by a single author (as, in fact, my own (soon-to-be released under a free license) novel has been), the overall, net effect of the body of work which comprises the fan fiction of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes (and undoubtably other settings as well) is in many ways more remeniscent of the Bizzar than a Cathedral approach. The Linux kernel is a bizzar-type project, yet within that kernel are modules and subsystems that are quite 'cathedralesque' in how they were managed and written.
The definition in many ways becomeds one of granularity, and while I agree with much the article writes, I think the author overlooks the bizzar aspect of the cultural commons from which all authors draw inspiration. This is readilly seen in the collections of fan fiction which abound and, were it not for the often extremely repressive aspects of copyright in limiting how and when a person can incorporate another's work in their own project (no, I'm not advocating plagerism, I'm advocating broader definitions of fair use that including giving the original creator credit for their contribution, if not exclusive use).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
One of the things I have always appreciated about the Free Software community is the way help of all kinds is given (to those seen as deserving!) freely.
My perception of the way books are normally written is very close to my perception of how proprietary software is developed. In secret, with help only from those with a financial interest in the book.
I'm in the process of writing my first book, which I intend to distribute under the FDL.
So, my actual question is, does anybody know of a mailing list or other "support group" for (aspiring) Free Book authors?
-Peter
Yeah, but did you check that Lessig presntation to the Supreme Court the other day? Apparently Justice O'Conner thinks that Lessig is right that the Bono act was unconstitutional and several of the justices are concerned that the the earlier extension may also have been unconstitutional. We could be looking at everything before '83 on the net free for download.
It fits comfortably in hand
:)
As does a pda.
can be stored in a large pocket or small backpack
As can a PDA. The difference being I can carry a bookshelf worth of books in my pocket.
and its cheap enough that if it gets lots, you don't care
I'll give the advantage there to books on paper as opposed to pda. But if something's valuable to me I'm not going to lose it.
So if I have a reader for my ebook, I'm getting a fragile device
I've been carrying around my ipaq in my pocket for about two years now, and it's never gotten so much as a scratch from the wear in a tiny case. While I don't get out as much as I'd like, I'm in woods and parks enough that I'd hardly call it fragile. Heck, it's lasted longer than my rice cooker.
that will have DRM built into it
I admit that part I'm not so fond of. While it dosn't make it any more legal, I usually just buy the paperback and download the ebook from a binary group. I wouldn't mind the DRM angle so much, but the publishing of ebooks is so sporatic that I'll often find a series with only a couple books of it in ebook form.
will require electricity
Not significant enough to really matter for me at least. I usually get about a seven to ten hour charge if reading under good lighting, and in low or dark light I wouldn't have been able to read it at all. Four rechargeable double A bateries are enough to just about double the time as well for long trips, so all in all it's a slight advantage in my opinion.
nd will be difficult to read.
A lot of people have good eyesight
Everything will be taken away from you.