Digital Reading Part Two: Virtually Free

I find that there's an odd fragility to the concept of the digital book. Short of a big fire, my physical library is almost immortal. Parts of it are more worn around the edges than others, but there's a good chance that even with wear and tear a lot of those books will be around after I'm dead.

The digital library? Back up often - one drive crash and you're wiped out. Even more of an issue is obsolescence. If you hitch your literary wagon to a particular proprietary format, you may find that it's unreadable in a few years as support for the technology vanishes. As an example, I have graphics files from ten years ago that I would have trouble opening right now due to changes in format, version, and in some cases because the software developer went out of business and their product was never updated to the current operating system. Now imagine the same problems with your ebook version of The Lord of the Rings.

However, many of the same comments would apply to digital music, and it hasn't stopped most of the world from switching over to iPods. And it would seem that ebooks are going to be the next big thing in the marketplace, as demonstrated by the plethora of overly-expensive (in my opinion) digital readers that are popping up in the stores. But high-priced hardware is only part of the problem. After all, buying a reader is just the first step - you'll probably want some books too...

Logic - a sadly flawed device for analyzing these situations - would suggest that ebooks would be cheaper than their physical cousins. To my astonishment, nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon's Kindle bookstore lists digital bestsellers ranging from $7.00 to $12.00 and claims this as a saving because the hardcover editions sell for about $26. Unfortunately, not quite as much of a saving when compared to the paperback that most of us would buy anyway.

Surprisingly, there's actually an acceptable number of options online for those of us in search of less expensive virtual reading, some of which are aimed directly at the science fiction and fantasy audience.

Topping the list is the venerable (by internet standards) institution of Project Gutenberg, which actually dates back to 1971 and got its start on the University of Illinois mainframe. Gutenberg is based on a very simple idea: free text files of books that have passed into the public domain.

For a genre reader with a taste for the classics, Gutenberg is a bonanza: the Oz books; the complete Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the Tarzan and Mars books; the text of Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, which introduced the term "robot" to the world; Skylark and Lensman books by E. E. "Doc" Smith (staples of my early experience with SF); classic fantasy by Lord Dunsany and Robert E. Howard; stories by H. Beam Piper; novels by Andre Norton - the list goes on and on, and it's all free.

For the reader whose preferences are a bit more modern, Baen Books offers a surprising selection of free books at the Baen Free Library, a basic web site that offers over a hundred different novels for download: mostly SF with a leavening of fantasy. Updates are irregular, but the books listed would make up a pretty good foundation for anyone's ebookshelf. There's also a site called The Fifth Imperium that offers downloads of Baen's free promo CDs, which include ancillary material such as cover artwork or interviews as well as the stories.

The Manybooks site falls between Baen and Gutenberg, with its base offering coming from Gutenberg but in a wider selection of formats, and more current additional material. Free Speculative Fiction Online has a reasonable selection as well, although perhaps with a bias toward short stories over novel-length works.

A Google search reveals dozens of other sites, albeit some that may offer texts of dubious provenance. There used to be a thriving newsgroup community dedicated to bootleg books, and although I have to admit to downloading some of these samizdata files, quality tended to be uneven.

The free solutions that I've listed would certainly give you a good starter library, but I think that there's a better answer to the digital reading question than relying on giveaways. In order for the whole ebook concept to really get a foothold in the marketplace, it needs to have a solution like the iTunes store, a solution which will offer a simple method of purchasing and managing digital literature without charging the same prices demanded by the dead tree publishers.

It’s a shame that Apple has already released a product called the iBook, but I have a lot of faith in Steve Jobs. If or when he decides it's time to reform the digital book marketplace, I’m sure he’ll come up with something equally in line with the rest of the iProduct list.

- Sid