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Are publishers finally appreciating ebooks? Beautiful Children as a PDF
February 26, 2008 | 6:47 pm
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By Paul Biba
I guess going to the O’Reilly conference got me on some new mailing lists because the following came in just a few minutes ago from Random House:
Building on the momentum created by the publication of Charles Bock’s debut novel BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN—a novel Newsweek recently called “the book of the moment”–the Random House Publishing Group will offer the entire book as a free PDF download from 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, February 27 until midnight on Friday, February 29. The free download, which can be shared, emailed or printed, will be available on www.beautifulchildren.net/read.
In a unique collaboration, Random House has also invited both chain and independent online retailers to participate. Thus far, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, Bordersstores.com; Booksamillion.com, Powells.com and Northshire.com have agreed to make the file available to their customers.
Actually the book is available now, I just downloaded it. I then going to use pdflrfwin to convert the PDF to a lrf for my Sony Reader. This great freeware utility works really well. More on it later.
Does this mean that publishers are finally getting the message?
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Comments:
As of 9:48 am CST I’ve tried the page
http://www.beautifulchildren.net/read/
several times and get the message
“problem loading page” I suspect concentrating the
demand into 24 hours overloads their servers.
Testing the site for http:/siteuptime.com fails sometimes from Chicago less often from San Francisco
(where it is still before 8am)
I can get to the page using the Lynx text browser and wget from my bay area ISP but so far have not figured out how to do the download which is initiated thru javascript.