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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."
Looks like you forgot to check the anonymous box there, bud...oops.
Living With a Nerd
Excellent!
... and back to the topic at hand, this is an excellent book!
I'm glad to see that publishers are trying this out. Tor has a promotion running, in which they email you non-drm'd books (usually book 1 of a series) every week.
And, ever since I bought my prs-500, it has been difficult to stay legit - I have a hard time buying a book online for the same (or very similar) price to a real, dead tree paper book. Sure, I could feel good about saving the environment, but why does it cost the same to deliver an electronic book as it does to sell a hard copy? I thought shipping and handling, stocking and middle men markups had something to do with the high price of the written word... *sigh*
My knowledge of mythology comes from the standard Greco-Roman stuff in high school plus whatever Norse you can pick up by reading "The Mighty Thor" comic books.
While most of reading "American Gods" was fun, I could see many references going over my head, and it was kind of like low-level overflights by a jet fighter. Whooooooosh!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The kind of stuff he does here, if other people did it the reaction would be "Gee, isn't he full of himself, 'look, ma, I'm writing real good!'" It would come of as affected and hackish. But the reality-bending stuff he does in here, it's just real weird good. Been a fan of his since Sandman. He has a way of turning reality sideways, making you suddenly aware of the audience before you and the stage machinery behind -- that literally happens in a few places. Strange, chewy brain candy.
I would also highly recommend Good Omens, a collaboration between himself and Terry Pratchett. How to describe it? "Imagine if Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote their version of the Omen and Rosemary's Baby, the Christian Apocalypse before Left Behind became so cheesy-popular. Yes, it's exactly like that. Go read it."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
Well, we like you. [hugs]
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.
Like most /. comments, the above adds nothing to the conversation, fails to inform, enlighten or educate. It also improperly uses a semi-colon. However, I still urge you to read American Gods.
Spoiler: Shadow kills Snape.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
As far as Gaiman's books go, I found Neverwhere to be much more satisfying read than American Gods. The latter felt more like a cross between the old "Sam & Max" PC game, and the second Dirk Gently story, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, from Douglas Adams, and not as polished or tight (or funny) as either one.
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Lunch is not free. Authors and publishers have mortgages too.
The book is available online for reading online only - not for download - and the online version looks like a series of highly compressed JPEG images given the "noise" surrounding the text. You would have to be fairly frugal to read the entire book on that site...and that is most likely by design. Read a chapter or two and then buy the book if you like it...and like your eyes.
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.
Yup. If I can't DL it and reat it at my convenience, then it's worthless to me. What am I supposed to do, keep a log of the websites that free books are on, and keep track of what page I've read to? ...and if i can't resize it as I see fit, it;s even more useless.
i read when I can't surf. If I can't surf, I can't read this. Dumb.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
As more than a few people have pointed out, you can't download it. According to his blog, Neil is aware of this and is attempting to get the publisher to actually place a pdf/lit etc version on there for downloading. Those who read his blog would also know that there was a poll last week to choose which book of his would be available. Unfortunately, Good Omens wasn't an option, probably because of the dual copyright.
:)
I have to say, I find it hard to see how he ever gets any books written - he's one of the more prolific bloggers I've come across
Between the falling angel and the rising ape