Quote:
Originally Posted by Jonas777
Don't forget that this site also has a lot of books free, ie it's more than the forum.
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Quite true. Popular and bestselling books of decades past are still good reading today. They're classics for a reason. Personally, I'd rather read a book that has been popular for a hundred years because of its quality than a book that has been popular for a month because of its advertising budget.
My free (as in both speech and beer) ebook sources, in order of preference, are MobileRead, Manybooks, Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, Munseys, Google Books, and the Internet Archive.
That preference is determined almost entirely, by the way, by the quality of their formatting. MobileRead has the smallest selection, but the books are built by forum members, and they're the best out there, as good as or better than any commercial ebook. PG is of course the granddaddy of them all. Feedbooks and Manybooks mostly scrape PG, but they have better epubs, and Manybooks sometimes has things PG doesn't. Munseys annoys the heck out of me, starting with the covers they slap on coverless books, but they have stuff that nobody else has. Google Books is all over the map. IA ranges from bad to terrible, because most of their text is uncorrected OCRs of bad scans, but they have unique material, particularly primary sources I need for projects; thankfully, they have the original scans available.
What's this about free as in both speech and in beer? Free beer is
gratis; you get the beer and it doesn't cost you anything. Free speech is
libre; you can do what you want with it. It's quite possible for an ebook to be
gratis but not
libre (for example, a $0.00 Kindle book), or for it to be
libre but not
gratis (buying a DVD collection of public-domain works).
How does a DRM-free but copyrighted book fit into that? Simple: When I buy that book, I'm entering an agreement of honor with the publisher and the author. They're not stopping me from doing things I have a right to do with that book, and in return I'm not doing things I have no right to do with it. In more concrete terms, they're not controlling what I can read it on, and I'm not giving copies to anyone. While it's technically
libre, it's not morally
libre, and I act accordingly. That's what any civilized human being would do.