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.

Comments

In the beginning...

[intermodal]

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.

Re:In the beginning...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Interesting read, but I disagree with a great number of his points. One basic problem is that he thinks a cool operating system is an end in itself, or absolute control of a program is the dominant goal. That may be for some folks, but most people just want to get work done. He then complains that people don't see the obvious, and make the same choices that he made. Folks have different goals, and it's him who can't see other's goals. Still interesting, was worth reading.

Hmm, so God has a command line. I wonder if he asked Mel to write it in Fortran.

Free/E Not the problem

[RobPiano]

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

Re:Free/E Not the problem

[f97tosc]

Reading a book on the computer screen is the pits.

That's the issue, isn't it. But what will happen the day when there are screen that are as comfortable to read from as books? Clearly this is only a matter of time. Maybe not soon, but it is bound to happen.

Then what?

Especially in education there will probably be a substantial increase in free literature. Especially in basic subjects there will be excellent free alternatives available.

For mainstream books the issue is more thorny. Naively you would think that publishing houses will loose all their power, and that authors started letting peope download their stuff at rates much, much lower than what would be paid for the book in a store. For some reason though, this did not happen to music. I wonder if publishing houses are as powerful and united as RIAA...

Tor

Re:Free/E Not the problem

[msheppard]

The technology to fix this exists. The Palm V and Palm Vx are ideal eBook reading platforms. Reading on the palm kicks paper's ass, to be quite honost.

Some key features of reading on the palm:
1. Easy to always have with you. Palm fits in your pocket, paper back will not. Knock off a chapter in line at wall-mart.
2. Back-light: Read in the dark without keeping anyone else up.
3. Bookmark/Annotate: Look stuff up later, never loose your place.
4. Very easy to hold in one hand and turn pages. Try that with a paperback.
5. Download now means at 4am if I finish a book, I can download another one right away.
6. Easy to share.
7. Search.

I am very much sick of hearing people knock reading on the palm (or eBooks in general) becuase "The Paper Book is the perfect interface." I have to reply with a resounding, "NOT!" I read a lot, every day. And since starting to read on the Palm, I always prefer it to paper.

Please do *NOT* assume when someone says they are reading an eBook that they are sitting in front of a 21inch monitor in an office building. Picture me, in a lean-to on the side of Mount Washington, reading a little Mark Twain at 2am becuase I can't get to sleep.

M@

Free Universes

[ParnBR]

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?

Re:Free Universes

[Frater 219]

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.

Aside from fanfic with its dubious legal status and contention with "canon", there is one example of this very idea which Slashdot readers may be familiar with: the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Mythos was begun by H. P. Lovecraft, who encouraged his fans to write stories in his settings. (There was little audience for the horror-SF genre at the time, and every good story was a boon to its popularity.) After Lovecraft's death, and to the present day, followers have continued to write and publish stories featuring Lovecraft's strange gods and cosmic horrors.

Like more commercially produced shared settings such as Star Trek, the Mythos and associated tales have spawned movies, magazines, and even a roleplaying game.

Sad to say, Lovecraft died in obscurity and poverty, which does not say much for starting a freely expandable universe as a means of employment. Nonetheless, it has certainly been a success in terms of storytelling.

(Lovecraft was by no means the only author who has invited fans to write in his universe. Another, rather more recently, told his readers to go ahead and write stories in his universe -- and then rescinded the offer after a fan wrote a story that offended him! The author in question was Larry Niven; the universe was Known Space; the fan was Elf Sternberg; the story was "The Only Fair Game".)

ok so its not free but...

[carpe_noctem]

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.

Orson Scott Card on free books...

[emarkp]

I tried to post this as an article, but it was rejected.

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:

And for those who say, Ah, but would you put your books online where people could download them for free? -- well, my answer is, I not only would, I did. Until the bookstore chains made me stop.

It didn't cost me royalties. It widened my audience. But try persuading a greedy paranoid of that!

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.

BookCrossing

[webword]

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."

I think many are missing the point.

[eddy]

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)

eBooks

[ScooterBill]

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...

slashdotted

[bcrowell]

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.

ebooks -- been reading them for years now

[jimfrost]

I wonder if a lot of the problem with ebooks as a profit zone wasn't largely the result of the ebook initiative people of giving you basically two ebook alternatives:

1. Go buy this $300+ ebook reader, plus pay them premium prices, in order to read them.

2. Read them on your personal computer.

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.

Are music and video different than books?

[Gerry Gleason]

Clearly the grandparent comment is claiming they are the same in this respect. The parent thinks that enough people will put up with it to make lots of money for the current industry players. They are different in that the digital copy can be just as usable as the original, in some cases identical.

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.

Re:business model

[Redline]

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.

Bizaar at one level, Cathedral at another

[FreeUser]

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).