Free Neil Gaiman online ebook - American Gods

[CTH]

I really like Neil Gaiman and American Gods,
other books he has written is
Stardust (now also as a movie)
Ananssi Boys (a bit lite a sequel to American Gods but still not, it is the smae theme in a way)
Neverwhere (not as good as the other I have listed but still worth reading if you like Gaiman)
Good Omens (the funniest by far, and that is to be expected when it is written with Terry Pratchett)
Mirrormask (Also as movie, and the book is more illustration than writings, could have been made after the movie)
Some other that is pretty illustrated too, a few shortstories collections (some of the short stories is really funny), the comic book/series The Sandman, The script (or part of it, i suspect it has been rewritten Neil wrote it pretty long time ago) to Bewoulf. That is those that I have come in contact with. I can understand that some doesnt't like his writing style, it is a bit dark and allways a bit "magic" in the books.

And by the way, I cant really see that Good omens is similar to Jonathan Strange & M. Norell in any way other that there is some magic and that is in england. But both is still great books

[Kakyou]

What I really thought was cool was that Gaiman offered up most of his most popular novels and asked his fans which one to put online.

The fact that a rather popular author would do this is pretty encouraging. Sure the format is not ideal, but I think it shows that some people are trying to figure out how to make ebooks *work*.

I think a limited, rather uncomfortable format like HC's website won't hurt the real paper book sales at all. Authors could give stuff like this away for free and it might even work as ads for paid downloads or pbook sales.

Implementation certainly could be better, but that can come with time. And as a free offer, I'm more in the mood to point out suggested areas of improvement, rather than complain that the offering is not ideal.

As more mainstream authors try things like this, I get more hopeful that an IP friendly solution for digital content is not far off.

[astra]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

I applaud the good motive and effort, but... gah! that was an awful book.

That makes two us!

I am so happy I am not alone

[TallMomof2]

I just purchased it a month ago but at least it wasn't PDF.

[grimo1re]

That book rocks!

[JSWolf]

The presentation however leaves A LOT to be desired.

[Pickle]

For what it's worth, I loved Anansi Boys and Good Omens and liked Stardust. But so far I'm having a really tough time getting into American Gods.

[TheLongshot]

Originally Posted by Pickle

For what it's worth, I loved Anansi Boys and Good Omens and liked Stardust. But so far I'm having a really tough time getting into American Gods.

That's funny, since American Gods is set in the same world as Anansi Boys.

I did think Anansi Boys was better, but American Gods had good things going for it.

Jason

[exreader]

Originally Posted by moz

Is it just me or is that an appalling way to read the book? Not only can I not see how to record my place in the book, I can't even copy a chunk of text out so I can search for my place later. And no keyboard navigation? Who are these people? At least the scroll wheel works.

Specifically, I'm not so much against pdf, I'm against any ebook that is images instead of text. Bah!

Hmm, for those with a lot of patience, if you scroll to the end and wait long enough (twitching the scroll wheel every now and then to prompt more downloading) you will have all the images loaded. Assuming your browser can handle a page that big. Then you can save the page and view the jpg of each page in your own happy way. All 615/47MB of them. Oh, and it's sufficiently dumb that it doesn't cache the dowload (probably so you can't copy the images out of its cache)

If you should be running Firefox, and installed say DOM inspector, or perhaps Firebug or a few other tools, you can have it display for you the entirety of all the images as http links, in the proper order; save to a text file, and then use a tool like curl or wget to slurp them over. You then have them cached as it were as a WHOLE lot of individual images. With the proper tools, you could OCR the whole mess.

or we could just write Neil and say "Hey! You love the Kindle! Amazon is using you to pimp them out... Then you advertise a free ebook... and we get this? So not fair".

Worse, it's NOT the author's preferred edition with the extra text and words and goodies. What's with that? I'd BUY it NOW even, if it were that, but it's not. Just the same as I already have on paper, so no $$$ will be spent for a duplicate. I wants more please

btb, that first TOR offering converted from PDF just fine (perhaps not PERFECTLY) to mobipocket, and is thus readable. except for some odd formatting (critical for programming books), I've found most PDF books convert pretty nicely, as long as they are not images holding text - feh

exreader

[Lemurion]

While we may have quibbles about Tor's initial execution, I think most if not all of us can agree they were doing the right thing. This isn't the right thing.

I wish someone could explain to Harper Collins that all most of us really want is the ability to buy books in a usable electronic format without DRM restrictions and for a similar price to that of a paperback.

We're willing to pay, they just have to provide something worth paying for. Even PDFs are better than online reading, and for most devices PDF is a pretty poor e-book format.

[CO'Neil]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Please everyone send feedback telling them we do not want PDF. We want RTF or HTML. We already had experience with Mistborn from Tor as a PDF and it wasn't nice.

Yeah, man. 100%. Why not LRF, while we're at it? Is it still really that uncommon a niche market?

Personally, I haven't cared as much for Gaiman's post-Sandman stuff as I did that series, and prefer either his or Pratchett's individual works far more than their collaboration in Good Omens.

What would really be great is for Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling to start giving away their back catalogs online.

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by CO'Neil

What would really be great is for Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling to start giving away their back catalogs online.

Sony's store has, I beleive, all Stepehnson's books except for Zodiac.
Um sorry, missed the "giving away" part.

[AMacD]

For a good example on how to give away a book, go to www.stevejordanbooks.com and download his free, non-drm book. I was impressed enough that I bought a dozen of his books. Besides he is a good writer.

[Cthulhu]

I absolutely loved Neverwhere . It reminded me of excerpts of a book called "The hidden City" or "Invisible City,"written by a Czech author and published by an now-defunct house.

The BBC show was horrendous, but I still like his stuff. Will need to give this book a chance after getting it at Connect, and check out this "Surgeon's Mate" book.

By the way:
The fact that HarperCollins allows a consumer to 'browse' a large portion of their catalogue online, with no time constraints, should be applauded. The fact that there is no means to directly purchase the text is annoying and surprising.

Told them so much as part of the feedback button.

[exreader]

Hey, check it out:
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/0...e-of-free.html

looks like Neil himself seems a bit ... annoyed at how HC handled this, and might be encouraging them to truly give this away, for the future...

Good on him

exreader