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Kake

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Bookses [Jan. 25th, 2004|03:15 pm]
Kake
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Places to get ebooks and audio books. Short stories, novels, non-fiction. For free and for pay. I'll update this as I find/remember more. Recommendations welcome. Last update: November 2010.

  • Free audio:
  • Pay-for audio:
    • audible.com - Various formats. They claim to do mp3 but they really mean DRMed AAC (Apple format, iTunes can play it).
  • Free text:
  • Pay-for text:
    • Fictionwise - novels, short stories, fiction, nonfiction, download in various formats including PalmDoc and PDF. Pay per book. Reasonable prices, friendly and efficient customer service. Often has a few freebies too - search for prices between $0 and $0 to find them - which could be out-of-copyright fiction, nominees for recent SF awards, etc.
  • Meta:
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Comments:
[User Picture]From: therealdrhyde
2004-01-18 10:53 pm (UTC)
Not pointing the unwary at dodgy LotR slash? Go on, you know they'd love you for it :-)
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[User Picture]From: rjw1
2004-01-18 10:58 pm (UTC)
how about dodgy thundercats slash.
i was forever scarred by that
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[User Picture]From: therealdrhyde
2004-01-19 06:37 am (UTC)
<reaches for the brane brush>

Must ... Scrub ... Brane

Make ... Bad ... Images ... Go ... Away
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[User Picture]From: sphyg
2004-04-12 03:30 pm (UTC)
Have you heard the dodgy Thundercats outtakes?
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[User Picture]From: blarglefiend
2004-01-19 01:58 am (UTC)
You left out Baen, who have both free and pay-for ebooks. And Palm Digital Media, who also do pay-for ebooks.

I use the latter a fair bit. All their material is in Palm Reader format, which is available free for Windows, Mac, and PalmOS. IMO it's the best ebook reader I've yet seen, and I've tried most of them.
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[User Picture]From: nou
2004-01-19 04:14 pm (UTC)
Do Baen ever publish anything worth reading? The books I've seen in their free library just feel like formulaic crap.

Didn't know about Palm Digital Media - will poke it a bit. Thank you!
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[User Picture]From: johnckirk
2004-01-19 04:43 pm (UTC)
I've bought quite a few books from Palm Digital Media (formerly Peanut Press), mainly Trek novels. And if you subscribe to their email newsletter (comes out once a week), it gives a discount code.

As for Baen, they publish Bujold's novels (the Miles Vorkosigan series), so I bought "Diplomatic Immunity" as an e-book when it was only out in hardback.
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[User Picture]From: therealdrhyde
2004-01-19 10:56 pm (UTC)
Yeah, Baen's stuff is pretty formulaic, but that's ideal for some situations. Like reading a few pages on the tube.
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[User Picture]From: blarglefiend
2004-01-20 03:19 am (UTC)
Couldn't really say about Baen -- they don't support Palm Reader, and the readers they do support annoy me to no end, so I haven't tried reading any of their stuff beyond the first few pages.
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[User Picture]From: non_trivial
2004-06-18 05:06 pm (UTC)
Yeah, Baen mostly publish military SF, lots of Boy's/Girl's Own Adventure type stuff, but it's good if you want mindless fun while your brain's in neutral. But they do have some good stuff - Bujold springs to mind.
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[User Picture]From: ceb
2004-01-19 01:34 pm (UTC)
http://www.freesfonline.de/ - a nice list of pointers to free SF & fantasy stuff online.

Also, tangentially related, for people who want to help out Project Gutenberg, see http://www.pgdp.net for information on how to help out with proofreading (it only requires you to commit to a single page at a time).

C. [still alive, but buried under a PhD...]
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[User Picture]From: nou
2004-01-19 04:18 pm (UTC)
Marvellous, thanks, meta list updated. Good to hear you still exist.
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[User Picture]From: therealdrhyde
2004-01-19 10:57 pm (UTC)
This reminds me, I *really* need to finish tweaking my script to convert all of PG to Palmdoc - and then keep it up to date. Now that I have the disk space available there's really no excuse for not doing it.
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[User Picture]From: nou
2004-01-20 08:23 am (UTC)
Go on and tell the world exactly how much disk space you do have :)
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[User Picture]From: therealdrhyde
2004-01-20 08:12 pm (UTC)
Lots :-)

But I'm talking about a web server here, which is an entirely different beast.
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[User Picture]From: rjw1
2004-01-19 07:56 pm (UTC)
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[User Picture]From: nou
2004-01-19 08:27 pm (UTC)
Wow, spinny pizza thing. And jerkiness and. Wow. No, I don't think my laptop can display that site.
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[User Picture]From: taimatsu
2004-03-27 04:37 am (UTC)
not proper ebooks, but books which can be read online: http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/
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[User Picture]From: nou
2004-03-27 11:13 am (UTC)
Coo, thanks. I'll start dipping in to that, and edit the original post to add it if it looks like a keeper.
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[User Picture]From: nou
2004-04-12 10:40 am (UTC)
I'm using this a lot - thanks again for the recommendation. I dropped an email to the site owner, who told me that they're reformatted Project Gutenberg texts. So nothing you can't get elsewhere, but I do like the format.
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