Free (and legal) books (well ebooks)

[Tuttle]

Accelerando being mentioned in the Charles Stross thread, made me think, so what about a resource for listing places where you can get free ebooks for introduction to authors, or being about to travel and want something to read quickly.

First off, there is of course project gutenberg . If someone has somehow not heard of project gutenberg before, it has electronic versions of books which are out of copyright available, made possible by human volunteers editing the OCR version. They have a whole bunch of books, but they're all older books (well, there is something from Cory Doctrow there, under the creative commons license, but basically).

Along with project gutenberg, I should mention that the amazon kindle store, has free copies of a noticeable number of the project gutenberg books in non-DRMed .azws. If you have something which can read mobibooks and you don't feel like converting yourself, this is available for people with kindles (or without). It's been useful to me to download from the amazon store, but that's with a kindle. However, these copies of the books often don't have things like a table of contents with hyperlinks added in. Some may, but not the few I've downloaded.

The next thing that comes to mind is the Baen free library. There are selected books published by Baen, available for free download, with the permission of the author. This one seems very much for the introducing you to the authors. Baen is a publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy books, so those are what are available on this site. I've heard good things about the books offered in general and enjoy the ones I've read. They also have somewhere to buy ebooks of theirs which aren't available free with good pricing, which is good to know, even if its not free.

Some authors provide a few of their books for free download, there is the aforementioned Accelerando as well as DD's own A Wind From the South .

[Birdhead]

Good idea! And for those without ebook readers but still wanting to be able to access literature portably, I really love audiobooks - shove them into your .mp3 player or onto a disc and away you go! Perfect for, say, plane trips where you don't want to carry the four books you'll need to get you from Auckland to London, not that this has happened to me last week or anything. LibriVox is good and I believe Project Gutenberg also has some audiobooks.

The Cory Doctorow book in CC is Little Brother, which has an associated audiobook that I recommend.

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

I've recorded a couple of poems and chapters for Librivox -- it was fun. :-)

If you want to help getting books into Project Gutenberg, you can sign up at Distributed Proofreaders. They post scanned and OCRed versions of public domain books, and people proofread the text to make sure it matches what the original said. Once the whole thing goes through several rounds of proofreading, the book is added to PG. There's a Young Wizards team I created a while ago, if you want to join that. Hmm, now I want to go proof a couple of pages, see you! :-)

[Tuttle]

I keep meaning to do some of the distributed proofreading, but never get around to it. I probably should sometime. I signed up years ago. I'll probably get into that this summer knowing how much I've been wanting stuff to do. Thanks for the reminder.

Another place for free books http://www.suvudu.com/freelibrary/ offers a few for free. I think they switch them off often, but there is some there.