Collective Free eBooks and Where to Download

[Alexander Turcic]

The Unix Haters Handbook

It is often interesting what one can find on Microsoft's servers. Check here and click on the "Now online for free!!" link.

The original thread/discussion can be found here.

[eponymous]

Cory Doctorow has released his first novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", as a free download under a Creative Commons license. The book is hard to classify... It's sort of what might happen if Neal Stephenson, Daniel Keys Moran, and a Walt Disney World travel guide writer were all sitting around a table in Liberty Square in the Magic Kingdom riffing on "cyberpunk" themes and the Haunted Mansion.

It's available in multiple formats here:

http://www.craphound.com/down/download.php

There's a PDB for iSilo, a PDB for Mobipocket, and an HTML link for just about anything else.

You *CAN* walk into your local major bookstore and buy this book off the shelf and if you like the book I strongly encourage you to do so and then send really nice email to Cory Doctorow and the good people at Tor Books telling them you read the eBook and then ran right out and bought the physical book as well. Let them know that being able to download the full copy for free won't decrease their sales it will increase them!

The original thread/discussion can be found here.

[Kingston]

This looks like a pretty good book, and the author licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial license but not only is it in pdf format, you have to download individual chapters in pdf!

The license says

You are free:

• to Share — to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to Remix

So maybe someone with a lot of free time would like to download all the chapters and combine them into a book.

Here's a New York Times article about this book and others:

February 19, 2008, 12:38 pm Free Books on the Internet: HarperCollins, Oprah, and Yale Join the Fray

By Melissa Lafsky

Given our fondness for all things publishing here at Freakonomics, we’ve been following the development of e-books with particular interest. In the past few weeks, it appears that the free e-book movement has officially begun. Last week, publishing monolith HarperCollins (the publisher of Freakonomics) announced that it would offer free electronic editions of a group of its books on the company’s Web site. This week, Suze Orman’s Women & Money made headlines when more than 1 million copies were downloaded after Oprah Winfrey announced the book’s Internet availability on her show.
Now, author and George Washington University associate law professor Dan Solove informs us that Yale University Press has allowed him to put the full text of his new book, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, in free downloadable format on the book’s Web site. The publisher has also started releasing other their titles, such as Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, in full on the Internet.
It remains to be seen whether availability online will translate to higher sales for these books, though 1 million downloads in one day certainly bodes well for both Orman’s sales figures and e-books’ overall popularity. Whether this movement will lead to the rise of the Kindle remains to be seen.


Here's the link for "The Wealth of Networks"
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_net...Fs_of_the_book

It'll set you back a cool $36.00 in Kindle format: http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Network...3427081&sr=1-1

The original thread/discussion can be found here.

[Kingston]

Bjørn Christian Tørrissen is on a mission to teach the world to travel off the beaten path. His book, One for the Road, published in January 2008, is all about independent travel, as the reader accompanies him vicariously backpacking through three quite different regions of the world: Patagonia and Antarctica, Southern Africa and Russia from Vladivostok to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Go to his One For The Road website to download a text-only version of the book for free in Mobipocket format for reading on your Kindle or as a PDF document with full text and images.

Bjørn has traveled extensively through thirty countries and describes himself as "the kind of guy who always finishes his vegetables and never forgets to brush his teeth...fond of reading but not an intellectual, in good shape and quite likely to spend the day exploring on foot, whether it's in a city, a jungle or a desert. In short, just the type of person who would make an amiable traveling companion.

Check out the author's One For The Road blog, leave a donation if you like, and let Bjørn know if you enjoyed the book. It should be available as a tree book on Amazon in the near future and he encourages you to review it there.

Props to Jan at the Kindle Reader blog for this link.

The original thread/discussion can be found here.

[JSWolf]

This thread will be a catch-all for the free eBook downloads. When a new thread is started on a free download, the initial message of that thread will be copied here so we can have a single place to go to find free eBook downloads. The original threads will still be there so discussion of the eBooks can take place.

[kaas]

I don't know if you have heard of www.sennadar.com but the Author, Fel, has written an eight book long saga, able to compete with the best ones out there.

Follow Tarrin Kael through a journey filled with danger, magic, and an incredible developement of events. But beware, it is addictive

A must read if you liked robert jordan - especially since the first books precede him!

cheers,
kaas

The original thead can be found here.

[melmurray]

Nightshade books are offering a free ebook download of John Armstrong's Grey. It's been nominated for John W Campell award and I've heard its definitely worth looking at.

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by melmurray

Nightshade books are offering a free ebook download of John Armstrong's Grey. It's been nominated for John W Campell award and I've heard its definitely worth looking at.

Got a link?

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Got a link?

I'm not the original poster, but here you go

[Xenophon]

It's been listed elsewhere, but we may as well get it up in this thread too.

Check out the Baen Free Library for around a hundred free SF and Fantasy novels. Free to download in multiple formats with no DRM.

Most were originally published by Baen, but some have been contributed by authors who write for other publishers.

Xenophon