With about a zillion people getting Kindles for Christmas, they’re going to be wanting something to read, and not necessarily for a lot of money, either. I spotted a couple of articles highlighting some of the best works available to read for free on Kindles. One of them offers an intriguing theory on why Amazon’s quality control may be so random. The UK blog PC Pro lists a number of these works, split about evenly between public-domain works and newer titles. I’m not sure whether all of them are available in the US version of the store, international rights...

Often hilarious and usually surreal novelist Daniel Pinkwater is serializing his latest work, Bushman Lives, on the book’s website. The first three chapters are up so far, and they definitely continue the surreal and hilarious trend. New chapters will be added every Monday. The book itself doesn’t appear to be available for purchase yet, but hopefully this experiment in serialization will attract more people to buy it when it is. It’s great to see a wonderful author like Pinkwater joining the free e-books crowd! (Found via BoingBoing.)...

On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports on some interesting findings from a Twitter discussion about e-book buyer behavior based on comments from book industry research organization representatives. The research reps suggest that limits on e-book sharing are limiting e-book adoption. The reps point out that consumers really like reading free e-books (about half of e-book buyers read free e-books) and expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower. Half of all e-readers are given as gifts, but less than 1% of e-books are. Barriers to widespread e-book adoption are limits on sharing,...

The National Academies—consisting of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council—recently announced that all PDF versions of books published by its members will be available for free download, starting immediately. This includes more than 4000 existing books, plus any published in the future. These PDFs can be accessed from the National Academies Press web store, from which print versions can also be purchased. They can also be read online for free. Although the e-books will be available for free, they will still be copyrighted. The National Academies...

We've reported on Freeliterature.org several times.  It's one of the best, if not the best,  compilations of free ebook sites on the web.  Now I've gotten an email from Marc D'Hooghe of the site asking for help: There is a growing demand on the web, generally at different social reading sites and also at our proofreading partner Girlebooks.com for a book by Carroll Watson Rankin, Dandelion Cottage (first published 1905 I believe, by Henry Holt, NY). Nothing freely available on the web this instant. Books themselves, mostly antiquarian (expensive) - we are in search of usable scans (300dpi) to make an...

The Fifth Imperium’s Baen CD repository has posted another CD. This one is bound into the release of the Mercedes Lackey superhero “braided world” book Invasion: The Secret World, an outgrowth of a podcast audiobook project inspired by playing and writing fanfic about the MMO City of Heroes. As with past CDs, the contents are DRM-free and free to distribute non-commercially. More than any other Baen CD, this one has personal meaning for me. I was playing City of Heroes at the same time and in the same role-playing/writing guild as Misty and all our friends, many of...

Diane Duane has posted to her blog that, in an effort to expose it to more readers, she is moving her currently free novel A Wind from the South to Amazon.com for Kindle sales. She explains that since Amazon won’t let her give it away for free, and she has to charge at least the Amazon price elsewhere, the price of the e-book on her on-line store will be rising from free to whatever Amazon makes her charge. The price for the EPUB edition will rise to match, though Barnes & Noble won’t let authors self-publish without a US bank...

You can get it here. The description: “Siegel continues his Love series of arch and diverting novels about the body-mind conundrum, sexy tales that revolve around the influence of texts as much as the libido.… As always, mischievous Siegel revels in the magic of language while offering tart social commentary on everything from Jewish assimilation to racism to the atomic bomb, but never has his humor been sharper or his characters more alluring than in this shrewdly spiked, cheerfully erotic, incident-rich Hollywood coming-of-age tale.”—Booklist “Hilarious.… A delicious, page-turning memoir that spans those doctor-playing, sex-obsessed, hormone-drenched years from 5 to 15. It’s...

Earlier I mentioned that Paul Carr had made an earlier book available for free download in the US when he could not find an American publisher. Now in Techdirt I find a report on a situation that goes one step further: best-selling Brazilian author Paulo Coelho (whom we’ve previously mentioned here and here) learned that his books had apparently been banned in Iran. (The Iranian government claims they are not, but his publisher says they are.) So as quickly as possible, he posted Farsi translations of them on his website for free download. Coelho previously found that “pirating”...

That's the title of a new book by Chris Armstrong. I got the following email from him about it: One of the problems which face all librarians adding e-books to their collections is that of bibliographic control: there is no legal deposit for e-books and consequently there is no single place from which new titles can be found. If this is true of commercially published e-books, it is most certainly also true of free e-books… and there are many thousands of free e-books available over the Internet, many of which are of a quality such that librarians might wish to...

Blog Kindle (unofficial) has an article on Bookyards. I must admit I had never heard of them. They have about 17,000 free ebooks in Kindle PDF format, says the blog. This free e-book library is mostly education oriented. So, a student, or a researcher, or just a curious erudite might find this resource a very useful one. If you were looking for an electronic version of C. Bresciani Turroni’s Economic Policy For The Thinking Man, or perhaps the Marquis de Nadaillac’s Manners And Monuments Of Prehistoric Peoples, or Charles Marquis Smith’s Electric and...

From the Threepress Consulting blog: Thanks to Hatgirl on MobileRead for this great tip on integrating Ibis Reader with Baen free books: If you use Ibis Reader, you will have seen the “Get Books” link. This allows you to view OPDS catalogs (lists of web-accessible ebooks). The Feedbooks catalogs are pre-installed, and some of you may have set up a Calibre/Dropbox OPDS catalog of your own library. On a whim, I used the “Add Your Own Catalog” link to add the WebScription Stanza link, Code: http://www.webscription.net/stanza.aspx?feed=free It worked! I can access the Baen Free Library directly from Ibis Reader! In “Get Books” I click “Baen” (or...