Free New Books
I’ve set up Free New Books over at - surprise! - Free-New-Books.com - it’s a site where I’m showcasing recently published books that have been made available in their entireity for free on the Web. There are plenty of great sites around like Project Gutenberg that collect thousands of classic texts in the public domain - I wanted to focus on newish ones, and also to make browsing the books on offer more manageable.
I feel pretty lost when I get to most online free book sites because they have few ways of guiding you through the thousands of books available - they simply give you a search box or an alphabetical list to browse. I want books highlighted to me and pithy summaries of why they’re of interest. So that’s what I’ve tried to do with Free New Books. I hope to find a couple of books a week that are worth adding to the site. Spike has a continually updating list on the front page of the latest titles I’ve added, which I’ll add to Splinters too. The RSS feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/free-new-books
I’m obviously interested to hear about free new booksfrom anyone else out there - and I’d also strongly advise authors to take the counter-intuitive step of making their books wholly available on the Web for free if they can. If you want to find a readership, giving your book away free is a great way forward - people tend to skim read on the screen, so providing them with the whole text means they can get an idea of whether they want to buy the real book or not. Plus, of course, not many writers to give away their new books for free at the moment, so it also generates some much needed publicity.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Seth Godin: Advice For Authors
- Using MySpace To Promote Your Book
- Gutenberg Needs Volunteer Proofreaders
- Literary groundhog day
- Free New Books
