Bartleby.com
In the spirit of Jeffrey Tucker's essay on book publishing, there is a great website offering all sorts of free books. It is Bartleby.com. They strive to be:
The preeminent Internet publisher of literature, reference, and verse providing students, researchers, and the intellectually curious with unlimited access to books and information on the web free of charge.
The site features reference materials including numerous encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, Gray's Anatomy, Menken's Language, the King James Bible, etc. Poetic verse includes a number of Oxford anthologies, modern and classical verse, and the greats from Dante to Yeats. The numerous fiction includes Aesop, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Twain. The nonfiction includes many of the great essayists and philosophers. These classics are available to all and they are all online and free to the consumer.
Comments (2)
I just found Tucker's article linked in a post on the Baen Books WebBoard. The reason it was posted there is because since October, 2000, Baen Books has sponsored the Free Library http://www.baen.com/library/ using precisely the reasoning expressed in Tucker's article.
With, I might note, the same results on sales figures. ;) Check out the Prime Palavers on the sidebar for more detailed discussions of this.
Published: March 23, 2004 3:25 PM
Oh, I forgot to mention that posting books online makes them more readily available to those with severe handicaps. The blind can read them using text-to-speech software, and someone who cannot physically hold a book can sometimes operate a keyboard and mouse to read from the computer sceeen.
Published: March 23, 2004 4:01 PM