Slashdot Mirror
Neil Gaiman Book "American Gods" Free Online
Denial93 writes "Geek favorite author Neil Gaiman has just made his multi-award-winning bestselling novel 'American Gods' available online for free. It's a trial by the publisher, and runs for one month. Gaiman writes in his blog: 'If it works, and people read it, then a) we may be able to put up another book and b) sooner or later they'll simply let us give away the book in electronic form....' It's an excellent book and much deserving of the many prestigious awards it has been getting."
It'd be well worth your time to go take a quick scan through the basics of Norse mythology. You'll understand much much more of the book that way.
I laughed my ass off when Wednesday introduced himself as Wednesday, as I was already suspecting him to be at least related to who he was.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
I thought I would be able to download a TXT file or a PDF of this book. Nope, no download. Instead I can browse it through the publisher's site, which is not only a bit slow, but also eye-straining. The images of the pages are so compressed it makes it unenjoyable to read. If only there was some way to rent books locally.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
From the mosquito noise, it looks suspiciously like the applet downloads a bunch of JPEGs. Doing a bit of analysis with tcpdump shows that it requests URLs of the form: http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/Services/GetPage.aspx?isbn13=9780060558123&pageguid=684604239068659&reqtype=0 which then gives an image URL which gives the picture (yup, a JPEG).
If you're persistent, you could probably set your web browser to go through a logging proxy and then record all its GetPageImage requests to get the jpeg files, and you could then browse those offline. But if not, I can't see any download link. You could download the applet, but you'd still have to be online to read the book itself.
Has anybody actually tried the link? It's awful. They made a single web page with hundreds of JPEGs, one for each page of the text. The images aren't sharp or fully black, so they are hard to read. And it takes forever to load. They added a nice AJAX "loading..." message over the top while you scroll, but sheesh - I'd far rather just go to the library or buy the book.