Free literature, now available at your nearest website

“I didn’t grow up buying every book I read,” said the English born Mr. [Nick] Gaiman, 47. “I read books at libraries, I read books at friend’s houses, I read books that I found on people’s window sills.”Eventually, he said, he bought his own books and he believes other readers will, too.

Neil Gaiman decided to give away one of his books free online (initially for a month), as a “celebratory birthday thing” for his blog’s 7th birthday.

You can vote and help him choose which one its going to be on his site.

At the same time, NYT publishes an article on how HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site.

About a month ago Lawrence Lessig announced that the last of his books is now free to download (and remix).

After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they’ve agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

On January 1st, Charles Sheehan-Miles decided to give the electronic version of his book, Republic, for free.

No more sample chapters, partial books that end in the middle, none of that. You can download and read the complete book. Share it with your friends, email it, do anything you want with it except sell it.

Here’s why: the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.

Chris Anderson wrote about it at the time:

For the vast majority of authors, being read is actually reward enough. How to turn that recognition into a living is a whole other process, and not necessarily one that depends on the traditional book industry to deliver. Good thing, too, since it so rarely does.

I think 2008 is a good year for electronic book publishing. Let’s see what it’ll do for other media publishing..

BTW, a nice feature is that you can search in most of these books (and many more) in Google Book Search.