Free Books!
This article, “The Internet Debacle – An Alternative View,” makes a meandering, under-researched, and sometimes facile case against the recording industry’s stance on downloadable music. Don’t get me wrong; I think the recording industry is being silly . . . I just don’t understand how this article got to #3 on Blogdex; it’s not that good.
But…it did point me to the Baen Free Library from Baen Books, a science fiction publisher. Now, I’m a much larger book afficionado than music afficionado, so this is the stuff I geek out on. More importantly, the introduction to the Baen Free Library (by Eric Flint) is a stellar argument for how a publishing industry (book, in this instance, but could arguably be music as well) can benefit from free downloading of material.
Granted, books are different — unless you have a scanner and a lot of spare time, digitizing your favorite author to share online isn’t that easy. Hopefully, as initiatives like the Baen Free Library take off, It will be interesting to see if those digital versions of books get traded online outside of the “official” publisher’s library.