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Originally Posted by emellaich
Two thoughts occur to me on this discussion.
1) There seems to be some confusion between the word 'free' and the term 'self-published'. They aren't the same thing at all. Baen and many other reputable publishers use free as a promotional tool to pull you into the later books. (I know this doesn't interest you Astra, and I understand it doesn't work for you.). I find many of these free books to be quite worthwhile. Frankly, in many cases a publisher makes a book free that is tied to five or six others of the same series. The fact that the publisher has continued to publish the series is a pretty good sign that it has found some level of audience enjoyment.
2) In regard to self-published works -- I do read them. However, I don't like to take a chance (waste my time) on something completely untried. I read quite a bit more than Astra, but there are now so many books out there that i can be somewhat selective. This means that I look for something that has reviews of 4 stars out of five by at least 20 reviewers.
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Free and self-published books are sometimes one in the same, as various posts have touched on. The ones given away by major publishers usually are available for only a limited time. The public domain ones are now free because copyright has expired.
Fiction is most widely available free and self-published. For my purposes, I'm least likely to be interested in those type of books. That's the stuff that requires the most time to filter, because there is so much of it. IMO, much of it is of poor quality.