One million freebie e-books?

They mean 1 million of the titles are free, I think. Public domain?

Got a link for that story? All I can find is stories from a week ago such as this one:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/jacks-...l-kobo-e-readers-starting-on-monday-10024563/
They say they've got 2.2 million ebooks available for sale for the reader, but I've not yet seen a mention of a million free (e?)books.

They'll be public domain books, I'd have thought, and maybe a few special deals to hook people (it wouldn't surprise me to see the first books of some famous series in there, to encourage people to buy the rest). These books are already available for free online anyway through sites like Project Gutenberg, and that's not stopped people buying new books! People will pick through for a few they want to read, maybe dip into them when they haven't got anything new to hand, but most of them won't be of interest to the average purchaser.

Well, they had better check that they do have the copyright, otherwise they will be sued like Google is sued by Authors Guild. Though the Google saga has been an ongoing story since 2005, so the jury is still out ...

epublishabook said:

Well, they had better check that they do have the copyright, otherwise they will be sued like Google is sued by Authors Guild. Though the Google saga has been an ongoing story since 2005, so the jury is still out ...

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WHS doesn't need to "have the copyright" in the books which are being offered for free.

In this case, pricing is determined by the publisher of the books concerned. Judging from the Top 50 list here, the free books appear to be short promotional titles, backlist titles, or books which are in the public domain.

The Google/Authors' Guild legal case has nothing to do with this. It's a completely different issue.

On the surface, this may seem a bit off-putting. Competition is already fierce for readers. And who'll buy anything new if you can get 2 million books for free?

But just because they're available won't mean new books won't be read. "New" has its own appeal. Also, those 2 million are across all genres, and there are new genres today that weren't extant at the time those books were first published.

You could always get old and public domain books, so I see nothing to worry about that they are being made more accessible.

Saul Tanpepper said:

On the surface, this may seem a bit off-putting. Competition is already fierce for readers. And who'll buy anything new if you can get 2 million books for free?

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The same people who would drive to a bookstore and buy a book when they could drive to a library and get 2 million books for free.

Free only matters if it's the book you want, and sometimes not even then. Experiments have shown that some people will pay to get a book that is otherwise free in a preferred format or for no other reason than to support an author whose work they enjoy reading.

My first thought on reading the thread title 'One Million Free E-books' was: "And probably worth every penny".
It's a million random books. Old stuff, promotional stuff, and, as CaoPaux says, probably self-published stuff. There may be a couple of things each reader might want, but first they'll have to wade through all the rest of it.

I have a decent library of books obtained from Gutenberg. Authors like Ambrose Bierce, PC Wren, H Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, EA Poe. And I've read them, I recently finished Robur the Conqueror (by Verne) & The Steam Man of the Prairie (Ellis). Of course not everyone shares my love of Victoriana.

The problem is printing them. I don't like to read tied to a computer (& I don't own a portable reader), so I tend to print books out.

veinglory said:

You could always get old and public domain books, so I see nothing to worry about that they are being made more accessible.

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The problem with that is scanning the text, doing OCR and getting them into ebook form. Google did that with huge numbers of books, but when you look in Google Books it only displays an image of a page and not selectable/copyable text.

Project Gutenberg claims to have "over 30,000 books" that are Public Domain in the USA, and those may well be included in this one million, but that leaves about 960,000 "free" ebooks that are who-knows-what. I can imagine not just a lot of self-published things, but with that many titles I have to wonder how many fanfic novels are in it.

frimble3 said:

My first thought on reading the thread title 'One Million Free E-books' was: "And probably worth every penny".
It's a million random books. Old stuff, promotional stuff, and, as CaoPaux says, probably self-published stuff. There may be a couple of things each reader might want, but first they'll have to wade through all the rest of it.

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One would hope the titles are well indexed, in categories, etc., but for free, likely not.