Free Literature.org is one of the best resources on the web for finding free ebooks in all languages.  If you are looking for Dutch, German,Spabish, Creole, Welsh, Danish, Hungarian, Arabic, Bangla, Bhutanese, and even more, then check them out.  They also have a section specifically dealing with poetry.  Librarians, especially, should take a look at the resources they offer. Mark D'Hooghe just sent me an email letting me know that this Voltaire work has just been made available. A remarkable resource for the worldwide reading community....

The Bookseller reports on surveys by Book Marketing Limited and Bowker Publishing Services. The surveys show, in the UK, that 15% said that downloading a free sample of a book was an important reason for downloading.  23% said that the cheaper cost of ebooks was important to them. Because free content is driving growth in the e-book market, Kelly Gallagher, vice-president of Bowker Publisher Services, said it was vital for booksellers and publishers to flag up information on other books alongside free online material. He said: “Consumers want something they can try before they buy. Any information you...

Joseph Esposito decided to take a look at Jane Austen's works, as represented by Google versions.  He comes to the conclusion that Google is doing the reading world a real disservice.  Here's part of what he says in his article in The Scholarly Kitchen: Rather than pay for the Penguin or any other edited version of Austen, I decided to be a cheapskate and searched for free Google versions.  And that’s when things began to go wrong.  The Google editions were packed with errors. If I were not studying Google Ebooks for professional reasons, if I were...

More rumors are flying around about Amazon giving away Kindle e-readers for free, probably to Prime members. This time CNET’s Crave blog picks up on it. Though it doesn’t mention the price point chart I brought up a few days ago, it does link to a GeekWire interview with a venture capitalist who used to be on the Kindle team at Amazon, which in turn links to a CNN piece which mentions it. Taken together, the pieces make some good arguments. The Kindles have always been loss leaders—Amazon makes its money off the e-books (especially now that agency pricing...

In reference to my post a few days ago about free on-line writing possibly devaluing paid prose, an interesting post came my way from Mary Hamilton at her Metamedia blog in which she talks about unpaid work versus paid from a standpoint of social relationships. Hamilton cites a chapter from a book called Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, on the effect of market forces on social relationships. The chapter talks about an experiment studying how hard students would work on mindless tasks if paid nothing, fifty cents, or five dollars for their work. It turns...

Could Amazon be offering the Kindle free by the end of the year? Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, thinks so. He points out that an analyst charted the decreases in the Kindle’s price over the last two years and projected that it could be marked down to nothing by November of this year. Kelly notes: Since then I've mentioned this forecast to all kinds of folks. In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, "Oh, you noticed that!" And then smiled...

A few days ago, NPR carried an interesting story looking at the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL. As David Carr pointed out, much of the value of the $315 million sale was created by bloggers working for free. When you look at personal blogs and social media, you might see random people telling the rest of the world trivial things like what they ate for breakfast—but altogether, what this mass of personal creativity represents is content. "As we all twitter away and type away and update our Facebooks, we're creating the coal that sort...

That's the title of an article in Publishers Weekly: “I never thought I’d say the word ‘freemium,’” says Kate Rados, group marketing director for F+W Media. But after launching a successful three-day free e-book campaign for Eric Lamet’s Holocaust memoir A Child al Confino (Adams Media)late last month to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, she’s not only saying the “f” word but planning a new one for Valentine’s Day, Pride and Prejudice: The Wild and Wanton Edition (Adams Media). “It’s a different genre and timing,” she says. “We’ll see how it affects the other Wild and Wanton Edition, Wuthering Heights.” More details in...

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...

Found this out at the Vook exhibit at Digital Book World. Tuesday and Wednesday you can download, for free, the Vook Reckless Road: Guns n' Roses and the making of Appetite for Destruction. This looks really cool. Here's the description: With 40 minutes of candid video interviews and 200 images, Reckless Road is the definitive book about the early years of Guns N' Roses. Enhanced with seventeen great videos of interviews with the band and their associates, Reckless Road presents the definitive picture of the band when it was living on the edge of greatness and chaos. Written by Marc...

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...

From the press release: To help the multitude of new owners with eBook reading devices, Kaplan Publishing is offering more than 130 Free eBooks in a promotion that runs from January 4 -10th. Owners of the Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Sony eReader can find select Kaplan titles absolutely free by visiting: www.FreeKaplaneBooks.com. Starting today, high school students; college students; those wanting GRE, GMAT or SAT practice tests; future doctors, lawyers, MBA's and nurses and many more will find a variety of valuable Kaplan test prep guides, practice tests, practice questions, study aids, and related titles that would normally cost hundreds...