Free eBooks

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 5:14 pm

The sci-fi literature fans on the site might like to take a look at this...
http://tor.com/index.php?option=com_con ... log&id=577

There's also some wallpaper art further down the page.

Post by **Disembodied** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 6:51 pm

Cool! People might be also be interested in Charles Stross's recent novel Accelerando, which I've read and enjoyed. Although the book is published and available in print, the author has made it available for free download under a Creative Commons licence here.

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 7:28 pm

Disembodied wrote:
Although the book is published and available in print, the author has made it available for free download under a Creative Commons licence here.

It is nice to be able to download free stuff, but am I the only one who wonders how these authors pay their bills?

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 7:51 pm

JohnnyBoy wrote:
It is nice to be able to download free stuff, but am I the only one who wonders how these authors pay their bills? :?

Free downloads drive sales. This is especially true for books, where the digital version is still clearly inferior. In the Tor case, most of those authors have several other related books which are not available for free.

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 8:46 pm

Ahruman wrote:
Free downloads drive sales. This is especially true for books, where the digital version is still clearly inferior. In the Tor case, most of those authors have several other related books which are not available for free.

I honestly hope that you're right, Ahruman. I'm currently writing scripts for audiobooks which are designed to improve the skills of college/university students. Today, while British news was reporting that ISPs will try to stop piracy, it was revealed that 96% of 16-24 year olds (my target audience) regularly pirates music tracks, with university students being the worst offenders.

I've committed serious quantities of time and money to this project, so like I say Ahruman, I hope that this strategy of "giving a little and selling a lot" works.

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 9:14 pm

JohnnyBoy wrote:
it was revealed that 96% of 16-24 year olds (my target audience) regularly pirates music tracks…

…which tells you absolutely nothing. It is still hotly debated what effect piracy actually has on music sales, but one thing that is clear is that most people who buy a lot of music also pirate a lot of music.

Post by **Disembodied** » Thu Jul 24, 2008 9:49 pm

Ahruman wrote:
Free downloads drive sales. This is especially true for books, where the digital version is still clearly inferior. In the Tor case, most of those authors have several other related books which are not available for free.

This, I think, is true, although there's not a lot of hard data to support it yet. It's a big hurdle to overcome with publishing, which has a long history of fighting book piracy: I used to work for a medical publisher in the 1990s, and we would find that ripoff copies of new texts, printed from scanned pages, would end up on sale in e.g. India within a few days of publication. Obviously a PDF, even one not optimised for print, makes that easier. But only a little bit easier, really (and in the case of an illustrated text, pirates would still have to scan in the images from an original book, unless the creators of the PDF were dumb enough to put high-resolution images in it).

There do not seem to be any good, clean and effective ways of ensuring watertight copy protection. There's also quite a lot to be said for the basic decency of most people. Shareware seems to be, for many things, a valid model. Charles Stross has said that he gets contacted by people trying to give him money after downloading Accelerando: he ends up asking them to buy a physical copy of the book (although he does mention that he gets a lot more money for a hardback sale than a paperback one...).

People might also be interested in the Baen Free Library. There are authors here whose stuff has proved to be a download hit, who have then, on the strength of those downloads, gone on to have their work published physically, with the added advantage of selling to an established fanbase...

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 3:02 pm

thanks for the heads-up, JohnnyBoy

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 8:15 pm

@Rxke - You're welcome! I felt sure that somebody on this forum would appreciate some free sci-fi. I'm not really a big fan of fiction myself, but I tried to change my ways when I bought "Snow Crash". IIRC, I gave up by about page 5.....

Damos · Post by **Damos** » Sat Jul 26, 2008 5:07 am

Thanks for the link. The free texts worked for me. I read one of the books and tomorrow I'm off to buy the sequel in paperback form.

Done a similar thing before where after watching alot of clips of a comedy duo on youtube I went out and bought the dvd. Also happened with some tv series I first came accross using bittorrenting.

D.

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 10:31 pm

I've changed the title of this thread from "Free sci-fi eBooks" to "Free eBooks". I thought that this thread could be used to alert other commanders about free eBooks that we think might be of interest to each other. If it turns out that we don't have the same taste in books as each other... well, it hasn't cost anything to take a look.

A while back I was digging around the Amazon website to find a cheap copy of a book by Howard Rheingold called "Tools For Thought" - without much luck. I searched again using Google and discovered that the author had put the entire book on the net: http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/

One of my favourite books is "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. The first two chapters are available for free from this site. You select your preferred download format in the top-right of the page.

Griff · Post by **Griff** » Sat Aug 30, 2008 10:51 pm

what a great idea for a thread!

Steven Poole has made his great book about videogames "Trigger Happy" available for free here http://stevenpoole.net/blog/trigger-happier/
plus he's also uploaded what looks to be the complete collection of his writing for Edge Magazine too: http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/

Post by **Disembodied** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 1:24 am

Charles Stross -- and I say this at the risk of sounding like a Charles Stross groupie -- has posted the prologue and first three chapters of his novel Halting State, set in and around, or at least involving, the near-future online games industry here. It's just out in real, A-format paperback, none of this ripoff floppy "trade" stuff, in the UK, and I'm about halfway through, probably missing at least half the programmer jokes but definitely enjoying it...

JohnnyBoy · Post by **JohnnyBoy** » Sun Aug 31, 2008 8:18 am

Richard Stallman's story (and that of the FSF and the Gnu GPL) is told in "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" by Sam Williams - http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/

I've just started to re-read another favourite of mine, "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner. It's the story of John Carmack and John Romero who founded id software and created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein-3D, Doom and Quake. It's a cracking story, and I thought that someone here might be interested.... http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/disp ... ew=excerpt

P.S. Griff, I've downloaded 'Trigger Happy' and have started to read it. Cheers, fella!

drew · Post by **drew** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:23 am

Ahruman wrote:
JohnnyBoy wrote:
It is nice to be able to download free stuff, but am I the only one who wonders how these authors pay their bills?
Free downloads drive sales. This is especially true for books, where the digital version is still clearly inferior. In the Tor case, most of those authors have several other related books which are not available for free.

I think a lot of authors or would be authors have to have alternative dayjobs/sources of income.

I have found that a lot of people have 'bought' (production costs only I hasten to add!) Status Quo on the back of downloading the free CC version from the wiki, but the attach ratio is around 500:1.

Of course, just downloading the story doesn't mean you've actually read it - so it's very difficult to gauge!

My long term strategy would have a mix of less serious books available for free, with my 'proper' books only available in the published arena, with perhaps the first chapter available online....

Cheers,

Drew.