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Originally Posted by ATDrake
I certainly hope they'll be permafreebies.
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Definitely are not this. Some of the early ones have already gone back up in price.
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B&N would be smart to lure people in to using their Reader/NookStudy app (supposed to be a bunch free included in their College Kick-Start Kit) and possibly get an actual nook by promising umpteen free classics, Kobo-style.
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My Kobo came with 100 classics. Don't know what they looked like, as trying to sync it with the Border software (which only had 5 classics) kept locking up my computer. After four days, one of the resets on the Kobo (required to get the blasted thing to restart) resulted in apparently wiping them out, after which it would sync (although it didn't even want the five freebies at that point and they didn't transfer onto it); once past that point, I gave up and started using Calibre instead.
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Cost them practically nothing, as it's all public domain in the US, and they probably pay a relative pittance to the people who did the essays and stuff.
I think it'll appeal a lot to people who don't know enough about ebooks to go to Project Gutenberg, much less Feedbooks/Manybooks/here, and balk at paying the $XX that some of the public domain re-packagers charge, or just don't want the hassle of tracking down well-formatted free versions in the first place.
As for what's different about the B&N Classics, they're nice versions with bonus material: introductions, foot/endnotes, and essays generally written by scholarly people. Well worth the download.
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They are nice versions (just as Penguin classics in paper often are). Not really comparable to the million or so free texts that all the stores claim (which are often full of bad OCR's and for older texts, often language that is no longer in common use). Apparently with translated works, they do often use older translations (a more modern one means it is still under copyright).