Cory Doctorow Releases 'Eastern Standard Tribe'

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

Comments

Other sources of good books

[Togakure]

Baen Books deserves a mention for doing very similar to this. While not using the Creative Commons licence, what they have done is said "Here are the books in the free library, read as you will, if you loan it out to a friend that's fine." http://www.baen.com/library/ Believe me, some very good books in that listing, and some well written arguments in the Prime Palavar section of that site on why they've done what they've done.

Also Baen have their Webscriptions service. For US$10 or US$15, you can purchase a month's worth of books (5 to 6 books) for reading, downloading, whatever, or you can buy individual books for about US$5. Again, all in open formats (html, etc). There is no obligation to buy more at any time but I've found there is usually enough of interest that I've bought near on 30 months worth of subscriptions over time :)

PDF is open

[Xoder]

I've said it several times PDF is an Open Specification.

There are several Free readers, such as GView, gv, xpdf, and so on. YES, even on Windows a Free reader is available (it's an add-on to GhostScript, find it yourself)

Complaining about PDF because of Acrobat is like complaining about HTML because of MSIE.