World eBook Fair

[bshort]

The World eBook Fair is currently open to celebrate the Gutenberg Project's 35th birthday.

via

[Alexander Turcic]

Thanks bshort. What I don't understand: what's so special about offering e-books of the public domain for free?

1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.

Free of charge for a month? Hasn't the Gutenberg Project always been free?

[bshort]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

Thanks bshort. What I don't understand: what's so special about offering e-books of the public domain for free?

I think they're also offering a lot of books that aren't in the public domain and which aren't offered by Project Gutenberg.

[Alexander Turcic]

Ok that explains. I haven't paid too much attention to the WE fair really. Maybe I should give it a second try.

[ebookstoregirl]

The World eBook Fair does offer the Guttenberg Collection, but it also has MANY other collections available. There are 330,000 FREE eBook titles - and a large number of these are NOT public domain, and are NOT available for FREE beyond this month. The DPPstore Collection showcases work from authors who retail their eBooks through us - some are even full eBooks available for FREE only for this special event. See more from these authors at www.DPPstore.com

The WeBF is a celebration of the spirit of eBooks, which are fundementally a huge revolution in the availablity of books - when not bound and printed on paper, more books can be more affordable to more people.

HAPPY WeBF!!!!

Catherine - Aka eBookstoregirl.

[branko]

Originally Posted by ebookstoregirl

The WeBF is a celebration of the spirit of eBooks

No it is not.

[Bob Russell]

Are there more pdf format files at WeBF than at other sites? I haven't checked because I wasn't interested in pdf files until the e-ink readers came near, but I wonder if they might have pdf files there that work well with the iLiad or Sony Reader?

[Bob Russell]

Btw, there is also an interesting pdf at the WeBF about the Blackmask stuff at
http://www.qoop.com/worldbookfair/vi...339%3BS+CENTER

The eBook you are looking for has been temporary [sic] removed. This is due to current negotiations with Blackmask Online and Conde Nast Publications. We hope that this title will be resorted [sic] shortly.

The Shadow, The Avenger, and Doc Savage will be unavailable during this period.

[Liviu_5]

Hi,

While initially I was excited to hear about the WBF, checking it out I was very dissapointed and after spending 15' at the site a while ago, I revisited it only yesterday to see if it was as awful as I remembered and it was so; after another 15' I left the site and do not intend to go back.
The reasons:

1. Very poor search capability; having tons of info is useless without good search capability and in the case of books, this means at a minimum searches on titles only, on authors only and on keywords. To wade through hundreds of answers or to spend lots of times designing clever searches is not worth my time except very rarely.
2. Pdf format - generally useless for ereading (though good for printing) and while it's easy to extract text, why bother when the books of interest to me at WBF can be found in better formats like rtf, html, even mslit somewhere else

Overall, I would rate WBF at a 3/10, and that just based on the idea. The execution though was really awful. And that is a pity, but it is not surprising and it reflects very well on the relatively sorry state of ebook publishing.

Liviu

[ebookstoregirl]

I really agree with the greivences that Liviu stated. I believe that the idea of the WeBF is good, but the execution does leave some wanting
We sponsored the event based on the idea.
Next year, we hope to see better execution - since this is set to be an annual event.

If you are looking for FREE eBooks, check out our FREE section at DPPstore.com
We have 51 titles, and we are adding more daily.

*HINT*While registration is required for download, it is not necessary to enter a payment method to register

So, browse by author, title, etc. and download to your heart's content...or your hard drive's content - whichever is sated first

-Catherine
DPPstore