I just heard about this from a classmate, and I can’t imagine why I haven’t seen it on the SDMB before. Baen Books, a major publisher of fantasy and science fiction, has decided on an innovative and laudable way to combat online piracy of books: Instead of letting the e-books get stolen, they’re going to give them away, completely legally and free. The idea is that letting people read the books for free will ultimately generate more profit for them, in the same way that friends lending each other books and brick-and-mortar libraries currently do. A person who reads a book for free and enjoys it is likely to buy it eventually, and to recommend it to others who may also buy it.
So the upshot is that they’ve started the Baen Free Library, offering free (no registration required, even) downloads of recent books by a variety of Baen authors. Check it out, everyone!
Only on the SDMB can folks make you feel stupid and grateful at the same time. Thanks, Smeghead and bughunter… I should have known that this has come up on the board before. Still, it’s a cool idea, and one that I think deserves more publicity.
I really like that site, and it is a pretty smart business plan too - I read 1632 & 1633, an those books were good enough for me to go out an purchase the sequal 1634 as well a collection of the side stories in that universe.
I’ve just ripped through the entire free Honorverse on my little Zire 21, and convinced my father-in-law (with his near-blindness) to commence doing the same thing on his, and I’m planning to plow through other novels up there as time permits (although I must say I do get annoyed by some of the ‘partial’ novels, because there’s nothing quite so irritating as being halfway through a story and having to quit until you can find the rest of it.
I love the total portability of my palm, so it’s working pretty well for me.
You would be looking for a tablet PC then. I find palm pilots perfectly adequate to read with. The only problem is when I have it set to auto-scroll reading in bed and I fall asleep and have no idea where I left off. I can read a section and not have a clue whats going on and then a later section which I’m convinced I’ve read before.
I have begun looking at tablets in the stores. I suppose I will try to see one in captivity while I am in the US. I am interested in how well they do handwriting recognition.
Of course, next year they will be cheaper, faster, better. Its always that way.
No, although I seriously considered it before the second-most recent Harrington book came out.
… which is a handy segue into another cool Baen practice that I’m in favour of: the CD-ROM that they include with a lot of their books now, chock full o’ electronic versions of novels (in both Microsoft Reader and HTML formats). Emblazoned upon the CD is an exhortation to lend, share or otherwise make available the contents, but a warning NOT to sell them. Seems very progressive to me.
If your reading in bed, it’s not that much of a stretch to plug the power adaptor in and I think most tablets get 2 - 3 hours which is enough for a half-decent veg-out.
I use an old Toshiba Dynapad tablet and it works fine for these things. Windows Commander handles HTML okay as straight text but I should probably find a Win 3.1 browser that can handle the long file names and JPEGs. Plain text, like from Project Gutenberg, works great on the tablet but the files’ fixed column width will drive you nuts on a Palm or any time you get sick of 80 columns. One tool that works GREAT is Textify. It ain’t a pretty interface but it does a beautiful job and he walks you through every step of the way.
A program that converts to a DOC file for your Palm and cleans up the column width problem while compressing the file too is MakeDocW.
Please note that both of these programs are Win9x+ only. You Mac and Linux types need to track down or write your own.
