From this totally overwhelming list -- approximately 22,800,000 in .37 seconds -- I've picked, more or less at random, a site to point out this week and I've got lots of material for weeks to come which is just awesome.

This week's is the free ebooks section of The Book Depository. If you haven't used it before -- UK readers may be more familiar with this site than those of us in the US -- the Book Depository is a great used/new book-selling site; I've found wonderful stuff on here and, because the site only just opened a US 'branch' and is based out of the UK, you can find UK authors who are really hard to track down in the States. And they have a really cool free ebooks site. Obviously, most of what's on this site is for sale and it can be a little confusing to navigate, so be sure of what you're clicking on. If you're starting from the page I linked to above, I suggest clicking on the "Search free ebooks" link -- a small green arrow on the right -- rather than browsing through the categories on the left or searching via the main bar at the top of the page. This way, you're pretty much guaranteed to only get free results. You can get to the free ebooks site from either the UK or the US web address; it's linked straight from the main page.

The second search page is a little awkward to read 'til you get used to it -- the free ebook versions are listed alongside the for sale analog versions. But from here you can browse more easily via the search bar or the categories on the left which conveniently note how many titles in each are free ebooks.

There's quite a variety of material available here, from George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man to P.G. Wodehouse's Carry on, Jeeves, or Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution.

The Book Depository's ebooks are available only in one format: Adobe .pdf. The .pdfs are pretty vanilla: there's a title page, a page with the publisher logo, and then you're into the text. There isn't any bibliographic information, so these might be tricky to use for scholarly or academic purposes if you want to treat the .pdf like a "real world" book. On the other hand, many academic disciplines are getting happier and happier about students using electronic texts, so I may just be showing my age there.

Most of what's available -- as I browsed through -- is older material and, I would guess, public domain. The Book Depository hasn't gone head to head with Dan Brown, for example, to bring you a free ebook version of his latest. But some of these texts are rather hard to find -- check out some of the Bram Stoker books and novellas they have, for example -- and I think this could be a valuable site to have in your bookmarks list.

Whilst I’m pretending to read however, I also have a nose at what other people are reading. If it looks good, I might go to the library and get a copy, and if it’s a popular title like Twilight, I wonder how it is that everyone else in the world seems to love vampires but me! Anyway, I was directed to a website dedicated to being nosy http://coverspylondon.tumblr.com/ which I rather like, but I’m struck by a problem; if everyone is reading an ebook, is being nosy possible?

Well, I know that it is possible in fact – I was sitting next to someone with a Kindle who got on at Canary Wharf and managed to spy that they were reading the New York Times. But I have to say, this was quite hard work, the contrast on the screen was not spy friendly and I had to be quite close to the guy to work it out! I know some people cover their books in paper to protect them (or hide what they are reading), and perhaps reading an ebook is a bit like that. Is it only those who are embarrassed about their reading choices who are choosing ebooks?!

Okay, that maybe taking it a step to far and in hindsight, I might have been extra nosy on that tube because I had never seen a real life Kindle before (sheltered, I know). But I can’t help thinking that I might get less inspiration for my reading materials if everyone converts to an ebook reader. Having said that though, I’m sure by the time I get one, I will be so pre-occupied with excitement and wonder, I wont have time to nose anymore and will be inspired by the potential of the device itself, using websites to direct my reading instead of a nice looking front cover.



The site for discussion this week is called ManyBooks.net. I found it by following links from a SFSignal "free fiction" list -- I talked about the SFSignal site a couple of weeks ago -- a great resource if you're into genre stuff.

Anyway, ManyBooks.net is an impressive one-man project run by Matthew McClintock largely from free, public domain ebooks provided by Project Gutenberg:

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright.

McClintock writes that as of July 2004, most Gutenberg texts are usually available via ManyBooks.net within a week of their release. The site also houses works licensed under Creative Commons from other sources.

The ManyBooks site is clean, easy to navigate, searchable by author, title, genre, and language. You can also browse by what books other users of the site have recommended. There's a plain vanilla search box -- accessible from the main page -- and an advanced search which lets you narrow down by author, title, sub-title, year, language, and category. The categories range pretty widely, and let you get fairly specific: you can choose from things as general as "Adventure" and as specific as "post-1930."

You can use the site without registering, but registration is free and lets you keep track of what you've read or want to read and share what you're reading via an RSS feed, rather like Goodreads.

The ebooks themselves can be downloaded in 25 different formats, including .pdf, .html, Kindle, and Sony eReader. There are lots of others, I promise, including Audiobook which is pretty cool.I'm not sure if every book comes complete with an audiobook version, but it's definitely worth checking out if you're like me and use audiobooks for commutes or boring periods at work.

I downloaded a couple of texts from Louisa May Alcott (I was trying to remember a quotation from her Eight Cousins and the site had the right book at the right time!) and Robert W. Chambers, playing mostly with the .pdf and custom .pdf formats and they're not exactly wildly exciting to look at (what .pdf is, really?), but they were stable files, opened on multiple machines, and the custom .pdf let me choose font, font size, and margins. Those options really help me out since for a lot of online reading I depend on the Readability widget from Arc90 labs and that's not something that works with a .pdf file.

On the whole, fiddling around with ManyBooks.net was a great experience. The site was stable and easy to use; the downloads were fast and "as advertised."

Last week I wrote about all the 'added extras' that ebooks can have in order to become more than just a book, videos, audio and a connection to the web would let readers become more possessive about their books and authors, which would be good for the business - but publishers are missing the two important things that they should have for every ebook release.

Ease of access and wide access.

Ease of Access

Why do I use iTunes to download my music instead of torrent sites? Why do I pay for albums instead of typing "band name + torrent" into Google?

First - because it is wrong and illegal, but secondly and perhaps, for many people, more importantly it's because iTunes is easy. I can buy an album with one click - I don't have to worry about it being in an odd format that my iPod won't play, I don't have to worry about it being a fake file or it being a low resolution thing that sounds bad.

*Click* = *bought*.

I don't have to type in my credit card details whenever I buy something, I don't have to log in with a password - I boot up the software, press a button or two and suddenly the file is downloaded and synced to all my devices.

It's this ease of use that makes Amazon so attractive to use - Find the book, press the 'buy it now' button and it uses your stored credit card to purchase the file and then send it down to all your 'Kindle' devices (be that Kindle, PC or iPhone - still waiting on that Mac option folks...).

In contrast look at Waterstones site - I have to type in my account details to log on to the site, then find the book using the frankly awful search engine (want to look for ebooks? well you need to do an 'advanced' search, and then we'll still return paperback and hardback results), then add it to your basket, then view your basket, then checkout, then type in your credit card details (plus expiry date, and security code). Then, and only then, are you able to download the books you want.

It's actually simpler to google for a torrent.

(I won't go into the problems of DRM, as that's a whole other discussion).

So, if you are a non-Kindle user, you are stuck using an awful website.

Wide Access

What is the other reason for going to the torrent sites? Regionalisation.

All my friends are blogging about a great book that's been released in America, they all love it and the subject matter is right up my alley.

I go to buy it and, lo and behold, 'this book is only available in the US'.
Now, I could wait, in the hope that they will eventually release it in the UK, and hopefully I won't have forgotten all about it in the year that this takes to happen. When I do forget about it maybe the publisher will pay all over again for the marketing that will raise it's profile on my radar.

Or I could physically import the dead tree edition from America, pay excessive shipping, import taxes and hope that when it is delivered it's not been dropped into the moat at Kellett mansion.

What is more realistic, and simpler option, is to search for a torrent of the file download it and hope that it is either a decent scan, or the ebook with the DRM stripped out. Then should the book ever be released over here - buy the actual legal copy in order to reward the author and publisher.

And that's if I (a) remember, and (b) am honest.

Are you starting to see why regionalisation of books is a really bad idea. It is pretty much always possible for me to get your book via torrent, and no draconian Digital Economy Bill will stop the committed pirate, especially when 'committed' means 'able to click a button or two'.

A Proposed Solution

As I have mentioned in the past, the real game-changer about Apples iPad is the iBookstore (or however it is capitalised) - a simple and easy way to download books, with a decent economic model for the publishers and simple syncing with a device.

Sadly it seems obvious that Apple will restrict their books to iPad DRM format - thus leaving the Sony Reader, and countless other devices, out in the cold. You won't be able to read your iPad books on anything other than an iPad.

This is my suggestion - and it's for all the publishers in the UK, if not the world.

Beat iTunes.

Get together, and get together quickly before the iPad gains too much traction - form a jointly owned company, association, or whatever. Create a piece of software that is cross platform, both on the user's end (PC/Mac/Linux/iPhone/Blackberry/maybe even Xbox and the like), and on the formats that it supports (iPad, Kindle, PDF, EPUB, Mobi, Plaintext).

Make it amazingly simple and easy to buy a book - 'reduce the friction' as I believe they call it in the business lingo world. Make it so easy to buy a book that an impulse buyer, like me, can easily slap down my money and have the book sent to me within seconds without having to type in my credit card details for the umpteenth time.

Do away with regionalisation with ebooks. If you are spending some of your marketing budget on internet awareness (and if not, why not? Internet users read almost by definition), then why are you saying that you don't want the money from people in America, in Europe, in the Southern hemisphere?

Sure - you won't make the money on selling the regional rights to a publisher in country X, but won't you make up that money by expanding the market and from word of mouth marketing (and remember, those world royalties are going straight to you, not via someone else who takes a cut - disintermediation). Plus ebooks can be 'in print' forever - check out that long, long tail.

I'd also say do away with DRM, but that's a discussion for another day.

If you create an iTunes for ebooks - then you control how your books are sold, not Apple, not Amazon, but the publisher. Split the cut however you like, fiddle around with minimum and maximum prices to reach the ideal selling point, suck money directly from my credit card as I always have the purchasing client to hand and clicking on one button gets me my book.

Is it really that difficult to build a bit of software that is,

Simple enough for my mum to use.

Good, effective search.

Frictionless purchasing and downloading.

Multiformat.

Multiclient.

A large and persistent library.

Without pointless barriers due to geography.

If publishers do this I can guarantee that the percentage of ebook readers that resort to torrents will drop.

They won't go away (because for some people free is all they can afford), but it would stop people like me from wondering if breaking the law on this one occasion is maybe worth it.

Hell, make it simple enough and more people will download ebooks - and with a per-unit-purchase price of pretty much zero, that's all profit.

And if publishers don't want to work together then at the very least Waterstones need to start from the ground up and completely revamp their web experience - perhaps starting with a cross platform piece of software that will act like iTunes...

These VHS tapes had a film on them and that was about it - if you were lucky you would also get some trailers for upcoming releases.

Obviously the price started to drop, soon the tapes were much cheaper and every film studio saw that they could make a lot of money by putting their old back catalogue onto VHS.

Everyone was happy (with the exception of the now familiar cry that ‘piracy’ was destroying the industry).

][][][][

Then came the DVD - a much better format for many reasons. If has random access and a player fault wouldn’t destroy the disc unlike the familiar ‘chewed up’ VHS tape.

However, by now most people owned a large library of video tapes, either bought in the shops or taped off the TV and kept forever. What would make them want to start re-buying their library again?

Soon the DVD creators realised that ‘extra features’ would be one of the motivations for upgrading your entertainment library. Why buy a cheaper VHS tape when you could buy the more expensive DVD, but the DVD would have commentaries, deleted scenes, mini-features and so on and so forth.

Perhaps one reason why Bluray hasn’t taken off like DVDs did is because the extra features on a Bluray disc are much the same as on a DVD.

][][][][

What has this little history got to do with ebooks I hear you say.

Well, like DVD replacing VHS, a lot of people are interested in ‘upgrading’ their library. The obvious benefits are there to be seen - instant gratification when you buy from an online store and they take up a lot less room.

Unfortunately there are disadvantages in the format, that you can’t resell or lend them (and please don’t talk about the often mentioned Nook, the lending on that is so crippled as to be next to worthless) and some people just prefer books.

The cost is also an issue - why are many online stores charging hardcover prices for 100Kb of data? Who wants to pay that for books that you can lend or resell.

][][][][

One solution comes with portable colour screen readers, and by taking a leaf out of the book of those early DVD innovators.

‘Ebook extras’.

So, you can buy the physical book and read the text.

Or, you can buy the ebook and read the text, see an interview with the author, hear the audiobook, read the reviews and critiques, and read some samples of the author’s other works. Maybe even select a section of text and hear the author’s ‘commentary’ for that section of the book.

With a reader connected to the internet you could join the author’s fan club, discuss the book on dedicated forums, have online author ‘events’, update your Facebook site, write your own reviews, earn credit for money off vouchers for other books, become part of the copyediting for a future edition and have those edition updates pushed direct to your device.

Don’t those ‘extras’ mean that you’d be happier paying the current (too high) price for an ebook?

iTunes has started down this road with the iTunes ‘LP’ and some of the films that Apple sells have the DVD extras included (although for some reason, not the director/cast commentaries). The extras make us want to buy these items rather than just download the music or video from some dodgy torrent site.

][][][][

‘But’, I hear you say, ‘wouldn’t all this extra production cost money?’

It would - although with the falling price of technology the cost would mostly be paying the wages of the people to create the content. Once the ‘book’ has been created the cost per unit is pretty much nil. It essen

So first slip up I guess, I didn’t have a look online to see if I could get the Cider House Rules as a freebie ebook (legitimately of course). Instead I placed a reservation on a copy at my local library and waited for that to arrive. And sighed when I dragged the heavy tome all the way to Italy on my holidays and all the way back again. I don’t have an ebook reader or even a laptop, so this may have been the only eventuality for me, but I should have looked! Curses!

However, I have also begun to think about virtual book groups and whether these exist for ebooks only (and maybe free ebooks only). When one Google’s “ebook clubs” for example, the first few hits are for sites where you can sign up to access to ebooks by becoming a member of that “club”. I would be interested to know if anyone is involved in such a bunch of people.

In addition, with virtual book groups, who decides what to read next? My group have a “discussion” and we try to reach a democratic agreement. Do groups use some sort of voting system? Would groups split into “subsections” – sci-fi, romance, graphic novels etc, if the original numbers swelled too a great number? Is there too great a number in the virtual world? Getting very librarian-y, who does the organisation? Who is in charge?!

I suppose my real question is, is a virtual book group able to satisfy the questions and come to the conclusions that a face to face one can? Please get in touch if you belong to a virtual group and help my organising neuroses! This could be a growing trend and one which might help to promote ebooks as well as literacy.

I have to admit, I really enjoy playing with the machines set up for demo in these stores. It's great to be able to hit buttons, get it to do interesting things, and, if it stops working, hey, you can move on to the next one. It isn't as if you own it and have to figure out why, exactly, if you hit the small round button just after the large square button, the screen goes blank and then bright green with stripes. Or whatever does happen.

So I was standing there fiddling around with the wide variety of ereaders Sony had out for demonstration and there were a couple of them that I simply couldn't make do anything. They were on, yes, and that was about it. They were displaying a single page of text -- or, in one case, a paragraph because the screen was small and the text was big -- and that was it. It wasn't as if this was all this particular model did; it was supposed to do just about everything bar sit you down, make you a cup of tea, and rub your shoulders while you read.

The odds are that these readers weren't working because someone, probably someone like me, I have to say, hit the round button after the square button and fried the works somehow and no staff member had noticed yet. But even on the readers that I could make do something -- it wasn't necessarily easy to tell what did what. It was fairly self-explanatory, yes, and, if you had any familiarity with similar electronic devices -- like an .mp3 player or, I imagine, a mobile phone -- it was easier.

But I found myself thinking while walking home that what would happen if, to posit a philosophical question for a minute, everyone prophesying the death of analog print is right. Every known book in the history of ever is going to vanish from shelves everywhere in the next year and everyone's going to have to get an ereader or similar device. What would happen to those people who don't mess with mobile phones or .mp3 players or computers on a regular basis and aren't, therefore, familiar with the quirks of electronic equipment that the rest of us put up with on a daily basis? It doesn't look like being a friendly kind of learning curve.

And this is all very obviously "worst case scenario"-type thinking, obviously. But it can be handy to have in mind what the worst case looks like -- then you know what you're aiming to avoid.

The thing that has surprised me so far in the marketing of ebooks is how little innovative thinking there has been.

“Look everyone! The iPad has been released! We can now publish things in colour…”

While I don’t doubt that there will be innovation due to the iPad, I still see very little new innovation in the e-ink market. Even with something that started many decades ago…

][][][][

…I’m going to whisk you back now - back in time to the days when Wagon wheels were larger, kids rode Chopper bikes and the head of MI5 was a singing, dancing child actor.

In those days books were something that you read. You started at the beginning and finished at the end and that was that.

If you were a proto-geek you’d find a copy of ‘Little wars’ by H.G Wells and re-enact some of the battle scenes from Lord of the Rings.

Then, in the 70’s and 80’s a new type of book arrived on the market.

The gamebook.

These were ‘choose your own adventure’ books. Often aimed at children, they would enable you to choose the path that the hero took through the book. An example paragraph might read,

You are creeping down the corridor when you come across a sleeping goblin guard. Resting back in his chair a large money pouch dangling from his belt makes an enticing target.

If you try to sneak past turn to paragraph 236.

If you try to steal the pouch without waking the goblin turn to paragraph 17.

You would then read through the book with success or failure depending on they choices that you made.

Additional game mechanics would be provided by dice rolls against these hypothetical monsters.

While these books were often aimed at children there were some efforts to make educational and adult versions of these books. However, by the end of the 80’s with the explosion of computer games these books became less popular.

It was a little while ago that I came across Being Elizabeth Bennet: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure a ‘choose your own adventure’ book for adults. Aimed, no doubt, at adult women, pretty much as far from the original demographic as you can get.

][][][][

The American ‘Choose your own adventure’ books have received Kindle releases, thankfully the technology has been fully embraced and now, instead of flipping through the pages looking for the right paragraph, you just click on the link describing your action.

While the Americans may have published their gamebooks, the much more British Fighting Fantasy books haven’t been published for e-ink screens.

Yet.

However the first of the series is available for the iPhone and as a child of the *cough* seventies - I look forward to a more being released. Perhaps it might encourage some of the Harry Potter generation to get into gaming, and maybe persuade those children who think that Harry Potter is ‘soft’ to slick the blades of their axes with Orc blood.

Perhaps the ebook format is a way to reopen the market for new gamebooks. Surely there isn't a publisher on the planet that hasn't agonised on how to get a piece of the Twilight romantic vampire fiction market?

And what better way than to have a gamebook that asks if you want to stay with the stalker or the wife beater?

I may have mentioned at one time or another that I'm a big sci-fi/fantasy/horror fan and there are a couple of great sites online for finding free genre fic that I think bear mentioning here. Obviously, the quality of the documents may vary; some of them are just vanilla html for reading online; some are fully downloadable ebooks and then there's the stuff in between. And if you've got suggestions for other sites -- places to find good nonfiction, travel writing, literary fiction, poetry, or plays online -- let us know about them in the comments!

The first one I want to point out is SF Signal which does a weekly round-up of "Free Fiction." Here's the link to their most recent list. They cover everything from magazines to audio books -- note the two available from Tor where you can get an audio and a text version! -- and pretty much anything else that crosses their desk. SF Signal also does great roundups of genre news, articles, opinion pieces, movie reviews, interviews, etc., etc. There's no registration required to get to any of this content on SF Signal; they don't get into the requirements of the sites to which they link, though, so be prepared for that and you can follow the site via RSS feed, Twitter, or Facebook.

My other suggestion would be, in fact, Tor.com. Tor is one of my favorite "new" (-ish; I think they're actually a couple of years old at this point) genre blogs. Yes, they're run by Tor Macmillan, a publishing company, and therefore have the odd commercial axe to grind but they're mostly very upfront about that sort of thing and they have some really awesome people blogging for them. The site itself is worth checking out just for that alone.

But, if you follow the blog regularly, or even just pop in now and then and search for an author name, you can come across some great free fiction. Late last year, for example, they put up several stories from their Year's Best Fantasy anthology online. That's the link to the first post with the first batch of stories; if you browse forward through the site, you'll find the others. You have to register at the site to view the stories (this is true for quite a bit of their free stuff), but it's a free registration and very uninvasive in terms of being nagged by the site to do, buy, or look at things afterwards. Tor's also pretty generous about throwing up free chapters or previews from a lot of their books, or linking to sites that do.

In terms of Amazon, I think that by trying to offer the best price to the consumer they are doing a good thing (Go Amazon!), but they should promote choice. As they indicate themselves, it should be the consumers that protest against publishers such as Macmillan (by not buying their titles where they are offered), instead of Amazon doing it for us.

Are Amazon however opening the door to increased prices from publishers? Although they believe that other publishers will not follow this route, is that only until they see how successful Macmillan is (or might be)? Could it be that prices going up might mean free ebooks become even further away on the horizon? I hope not!

I believe that competition is good and choice is even better. There are now comparison sites for audio downloads and hopefully in the future, similar ebook sites will follow. *Note to self, should I be setting this up?* Until then, we will just have to contend with hopping around various sites to see where the best price is (and the compatible formats) and I would like to see my options as open as possible.