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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!
Part of the problem with digital books wasn't just the price, but the format on-screen. Most people (i.e. the general public) won't sit and read from a computer screen for the length of time to read a book. Now, surfing for pron or killin' aliens is a different matter...
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
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.ebooks will work as soon as there are viable, usable devices for everyone to read them on.
Pdas at $500 with tiny screens to read on won't do. Sure there are pluses to them, reading in total darkness is cool, it makes you more "attuned" to what you are reading (less distractions around for your eyes to wander). But they are not for everyone. And reading them on your large computer screen sucks for various reasons, posture is not inteneded for reading for one. ITs ok for manuals and on line help, beacuse you are using the program at the same time, but -at lest for me- ebooks? nah.
Free ebooks are another thing altogether. You download them cos they're free, and to "build up" an elibrary, it doesn't mean you actually read them all. Eg: I d/l all Verne's books and only reread 2000 leagues, and Journey, I have a jornada i use almost solely as a contacts and ebook reader.
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
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.
When I pick up a book, it is to escape from staring at the monitor all day. I like to kick back with a nice hot cup of tea and one of my cats in my lap & relax, which somehow isn't possible even with my comfy computer setup.
While I have never depended on a "publisher to make an editorial decision," I do depend on my friends & get most of my recommendations from folks who only turn on a PC to check e-mail. This resulted in my dropping over $100 yesterday, alone on stuff such as Dylan Thomas, Bukowski, Pratchett, Le Guin, Naipail, and Hardy. Many of these are copyrighted classics that won't be available online for another 75+ years and all are well worth paying $7-35 for a lifetime of enjoyment. Yes, they'll sit on my shelf and represent killed trees, but the electricity required to power my PC long enough was probably generated with coal that will shorten the lives of even more trees and people as well. My library, on the other hand, is passed around to all my interested friends and family, a warm, physical, and comforting way to share enjoyment of the greatest poetry and prose. As with all great electronic innovations, "free" online books bypass the enjoyable interpersonal element, be it of sharing a story or chatting with the librarian.
Yes, there could be some great literature online & maybe someday I'll find something work getting a headache to read. For now, however, I'm content with a system that ain't broke; the bookstore when I've got the money and the library when I don't.
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.
For all the open-source software movement's successes, I'm not aware of any case in which an entrenched proprietary program was pushed out of first place in the market by open-source software.
Linux was in 1999 (I don't know how it is today) the most widely used server operating system on the internet.
Apache is the top web server.
PHP has surpassed ASP in terms of number of users and is now the most widely used server side scripting language.
Sendmail is the leading email server (over, for example, Microsoft Exchange).
OpenSSH is the Internet's most widely used implementation of SSH.
Granted, some of these may never have pushed anything other than other OSS/FS products out of first place (such as Apache, whose predecessor was the NCSA web server), but aren't there a gazillion other examples anyway? I have a hard time taking anyone who makes such bold assertions, without even trying to first evaluate them, seriously.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
People always seem to be at their best when in small groups. The internet has the positive affect of cutting out the middleman and in some cases, perhaps slows down globalization (sometimes a good thing, but usually not - globalization tends to hurt people in developing countries who have the least).
It is a great feeling to publish a real physical book, but I have found that I have had to make at least two compromises with the traditional publishing process, mainly:
- constrained to write about popular subjects
- books that get out of date technologically are still sold (for many of my published books, I really liked them when they were fresh, but 4 or 5 years later, they seemed really dated, but were still being sold)
Anyway, when writing free web books, an author (like me!) can choose topics that are interesting but niche. I beg for small donations for my free web books, and I am pleasantly surprised at the amount of donations that I receive (currently, I get 3 or 4 cents per download, on the average, in donations).I am working on a third free web book (The Software Design Book), so I do believe in this process.
-Mark
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.
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
Hmm, so God has a command line. I wonder if he asked Mel to write it in Fortran.
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
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.
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.
In recent years, I've fed my kids through the work I attract via my contributions to open source and the publication of free software on my web site. It is possible to make a living from free software.
I hope to use a similar model for a fantasy novel I'm writing.
The novel in question was first completed some years back, tentatively sold to a big name publisher, and then "lost" in a series of mergers. Quite discouraging. Writing is a damned tough business; I know, because I made a living for twelve years with magazine columns and programming books.
I write fiction for two reasons -- because I enjoy it, and to entertain people. But getting into the fiction market (as in making money) is very, very hard. The publishing industry is terribly conservative and biased in the most incredible ways.
Success as a writer -- especially as a fiction writer -- is elusive. Lost in a sea of lousy over-the-transom manuscripts, agents, and myopic publishers, how does an author stand out and make themselves known?
Well, I'm told that John Grisham started his career by self-publishing his first books, and selling them from the trunk of his car at fairs and flea markets. Self-promotion is the root of all success...
And perhaps people will pay me directly, if they believe my book worthy.
So I'm publishing a book in a few weeks via my website, complete with full-color plates (artwork by my talented wife), and a story written exactly the way I want it, without the interference (or grammatical safety net!) of an editor. The complete book will be available under exactly the same terms as a paper book -- you can give it away, make copies for your friends, or print it out, all without paying me a dime.
BUT, I'll also have a honor-based online payment system; for less than the cost of a typical paperback, people who enjoy the book can pay for it. They are not required to pay me -- it is a matter of honor and ethics.
I don't expect most people to pay for what they download; if they simply enjoy the book, pass it on to friends, read it to their kids -- that will be victory (in a different sense.) What I'm giving people is an honest chance to compensate me, the author, for my work, if they deem it worthy.
How many times have you bought a paperback, found it unreadable, and put it on the shelf unfinished or dissatisfied? How often does a pretty cover conceal a lousy book? It happens often enough for me, especially when buying a new science fiction or fantasy book. Wouldn't it be better if you could read the book first, and then only pay the authors whose work you considered worthy?
Perhaps I'm too optimistic about people; if nothing else, this will be an interesting experiment in publishing and human relations.
All about me
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@
Krispy Cream is people