Ten Best Free E-Book Sites

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Vic Richardson

You finally joined the digital reading revolution and bought a Kindle or a Nook. Suddenly you’re going broke buying e-books. Maybe you have an elderly aunt who likes e-books because she can enlarge the font to a readable size but has no money to purchase them. There are bookstores, including the Amazon Kindle store, that will give away a few free sample e-books to entice you to buy more from the same author but the selection is very limited.

Where do you go online to find more free novels to read? You know there is some site

just one click away with a motherload of free books. After careful selection, I found 10 of them worth exploring.

Free e-book sites have evolved into several categories:

1. Truly free and legal repositories of books that are out

of copyright due to their age – authors

like Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc.

2. Sites that let budding new fiction authors publish for free to raise awareness of their works – readers then get to download their books and comment on them.

3. Link share sites where readers share their library by giving a download link to sites like Rapidshare or Megashare where the reader has uploaded a copyrighted book. Strictly speaking, the complete process of uploading – sharing the link – then someone downloading and reading the book violates copyright law. However, it is poorly policed right now and the sites and uploaders feel that they skirt the law in a gray area by providing only the first stage of the process.

4. User share sites where non-fictional technical papers and how-to-make-money books are posted. Since the works are original, it’s not illegal, but not likely the recreational reading you are looking for.

5. Some sites attempt to create a way to provide free on-site reading of DRM protected content by mimicking what the public libraries are doing. They let readers check out copyrighted e-books for two weeks. Once checked out, they are not available to others until the checkout time has expired. The DRM management, usually done in the Adobe Digital Editions reader for offline reading, provides the ability to disable the book at the end of the two week period.

For this article, I’ll concentrate on the fictional recreational reading genre.

Here are some of the best sites worth checking out from categories 1, 2 and 5:
..
worldlibrary.net (category 1 and  2)
World Public Library is a well organized and impressive website for accessing all the out of copyright books and a large number of copyrighted books, too, that authors allowed to be shared. World Library has over 2,000,000 e-books in pdf form which you can read online in your browser or download. Paid membership is optional and costs only $8/year.

..
http://www.getfreeebooks.com/ (category 2)
Free registration is required to access this library. There are donation links for individual authors but donations are not required. You can do online reading in your browser on this site or download in epub for general readers or mobi for the Kindle or pdf for general reading on a PC.

There are also a lot of blog-style articles here about free e-book resources for various e-readers – a very useful feature.

..
http://www.digilibraries.com/ (category 2)
No registration is required on DigiLibraries, where thousands of modern original short stories, novellas, novels and non-fiction are available for download by new authors. The site is well organized and downloads are fast. There are no pre-1930s books mixed in with the new ones.

..
openlibrary.org (category 1 and 5)
The Open Library project is a massive undertaking to get millions of books online. They have put over one million online to date and are a mixture of about 100,000 older free downloadable books (pre-1930s) to modern DRM-protected titles that you can check out for two weeks for free – there is a limit of five books checked out at a time. You can use their online reader in your browser, also, to read their books without the need to download them.

..
http://www.free-ebooks.net/ (category 2 and 4)
Registration is not needed to access this library for pla in text, pdf or

in browser reading in HTML format. For ePub or Mobi (Kindle) formats, VIP membership is required and costs $8/mo. Note that the Kindle can read plain text files, too. Fiction, non-fiction and trade magazines are found here and new authors can submit e-books also. The site has a pleasing layout and downloads are fast.

..
http://www.gutenberg.org/ (category 1)
This is the original book project that started collecting all

the old public domain books, over 36,000 and counting. All the books are out of print and are offered in ePub, Kindle, HTML and plain text format. The site can sometimes be slow and cumbersome to navigate but is well organized and the library is always growing.

..
http://www.manybooks.net/ (category 1)
Over 29,000 free e-books suitable for the Kindle, iPad and most other readers can be found on ManyBooks.
One of the category listings is “Post-1930” and most all the books have expired copyrights, similar to the content found on Project Gutenberg.

..
http://www.globusz.com/ (Category 2 and 1)
Globusz Publishing offers free contemporary e-books from new authors who ePublish to their site. It’s a synergistic way for writers to get published easily to achieve recognition and for readers to get new books in exchange for rating and commenting on the books that they read. Note that old books from pre-1930 are mixed in with the new authors to add to the book count.

Registration is required.

..
wattpad.com (category 2)
When I first discovered Wattpad many years ago, it was a category 3 site where readers uploaded copyrighted e-books from famous writers so the uploaders could conveniently read them on their mobile devices in a browser window. However, anyone else could access and read them, too. Since then, Wattpad has blossomed into a (slightly more legal) user created short story and novella site. Some of the content reads like a teenage girls’s blog but other content is first class. It’s all in plain text format in a framed window on the Wattpad site.

..
http://www.baen.com/library/ (category 2)
Baen is a science fiction/fantasy genre free e-book site.

The 46 or so authors are professional established writers who provide 122 books of their work for free to get you interested enough to buy other books they sell. Some of the more famous are Larry Niven, Harry Turtledove, Eric Flint and James P. Hogan. This method is also used on the Amazon site with a few Kindle books in assorted genres. The nice thing about Baen is that it’s well organized in one place, and easy to use.

..

I did not mention the obvious choice of your local library system. Here in the greater Seattle area, the library systems carry a great many e-books and audiobooks, although finding, downloading and only being able to read them on your PC is a less-than-ideal, daunting task.

Smaller rural towns likely won’t be tied into a big library network with e-book capabilities either, so online sources are rural readers best hope for free e-books.

In today’s news, Amazon has announced that it is launching a Kindle e-book lending service with 11,000 US libraries. A physical Kindle is not even required – you can use a Kindle app

on the iPad, PC or a Mac. I tried it using my local Sno-Isle King Library system and it does indeed work well.

I checked out a book and was able to download it from the Amazon site and read it both in the Amazon Kindle Cloud reader and the Kindle PC app. Full sync on all devices worked.

The cultural transition from printed books to e-books has created a rapidly evolving delivery system for the electronically delivered novel. In a year, this list may be mostly obsolete but I will endeavour to revisit the list keep it updated. Meanwhile, happy reading!

..

Posted in E-books | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

iHeartRadio Reloaded – Music Evolves Once More

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Vic Richardson

Music streaming over the internet is undergoing a metamorphosis. Ever since the MP3 format became popular, music has been migrating from CDs and radio to the world wide web. iTunes has clearly proven that selling music to load up your iPod or cellphone is a lucrative business.

Most on air radio stations now have an internet mirror that streams their talk shows and music selections into cyberspace. Standalone tabletop internet radios are selling well.

Systems evolve, though. Users want to make their own custom stations or have music on demand without really owning it – just streaming it when they want.

Pandora was one that pioneered this concept, letting users create a custom genre, for instance “The Beatles”, and then the listener would hear Beatles songs and songs by similar artists.

You don’t get to choose the exact songs that you want on Pandora but the concept works well for a no hassle, low maintenance way to get tunes that you like.

Pandora has thrived and even went public on the stock market.

Spotify was the next step up the ladder and allowed you to play any song that you like, on demand. Both Pandora and Spotify are free for a limited number of hours a month. The Zune Marketplace works like Spotify but with a very slick user interface and a steep monthly subscription rate.

Rhapsody has a similar service.
..
________________________________________________
..

Enter iHeartRadio. First, let’s look at Clear Channel, the owner of iHeartRadio. Clear Channel Communications, Inc. has been acquiring radio stations across the US since the 1980s. They now operate 850 radio stations and have 110 million listeners. They created iHeartRadio.com in 2008  in order to have a common portal to stream all their Clear Channel stations online. Six months later they launched an iHeartRadio app for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Listening was free with 22 genres covered.

In 2009, Clear Channel began to offer custom stations available only online built around specific artists. They also expanded the channels beyond their 750 simulcast FM counterparts and added commercial free digital radio channels across 20 genres that are only offered online. In March 2011, Clear Channel acquired Thumbplay, giving them the technology design team to create a Pandora type custom station interface. They chose The Echo Nest, a powerful musical intelligence data system with 5 billion data points on 30 million songs, to be the song selection engine for their new evolutionary user interface.

..

On September 14, 2011, the new iHeartRadio PC/Mac interface, dubbed the “Pandora Killer”, will be out of beta and

will now offer Pandora-like custom stations created by you, the listener. It will be available on September 12 for the iPh

one. There are no monthly time limits, nor ads. At the end of 2011, Clear Channel will begin mixing in a few ads to keep it free and unlimited.

The song library is impressive with 11 million songs, nearly ten times that of Pandora and close to the 15 million songs on Spotify.

The new online interface includes album cover, a bio of the artist, a graphic display of albums by the artist and thumbnails of artists that you could use to create more custom stations.

There is a six song per hour limit on skipping over a song, similar to Slacker radio. The six song skip limit is per station, so if you change stations after you use up your six skips, the counter resets to zero. Control are simple, just a Play/Pause button, a Skip (FFW) button and a volume slider.

One unique feature is a three position slider for Station Control of artist diversity. If it is set on “Familiar Artists” then you get only the top played songs in that genre. The other two positions are “Mixed Tunes” and “More Discovery” which will add in rare less popular songs in that genre – the back of the album songs for those remembering LP records.

The actual group that you set up is played less than one in 20 songs but the similar artists are very close in genre and period, much like Pandora.

Songs that are played are famous pop titles and a much better selection than either Pandora or Slacker has offered.

You can share stations with friends on Facebook – they currently have 1.1 million “Likes” on Facebook. There is a Buy Song link that takes you to the iTunes store. There is a Lyrics button but I only saw it have lyrics for a song once out of dozens of songs.

I’ve been listening to the beta version of the new iHeartRadio for hours on two channels that I made. One was around Wailin’ Jennys, a folk group from C

anada.

All the similar songs played were spot on – ones you would find on Folk Alley.com in that tight acoustic folk sub-genre. I created a Beatles station and all the songs were very relevant from that era.

You can also choose from other custom stations that your Facebook friends have created.

Is the new iHeartRadio interface a Pandora Killer, after all? I’m afraid so. I’ve been a user of Pandora, Slacker, XM, Sirius and most recently, Spotify.

The new iHeartRadio is my musical weapon of choice to sooth the savage soul. The 800 pound gorilla wins again.

UPDATE:
In an attempt to do damage control, on Sept 21, 2011, Pandora has lifted the 40 hour per month listening cap for free users and came out with a newly designed HTML5 look for their website.

MOG and Rdio made similar changes on their listening caps as well.

Clearly, Spotify is rattling some cages.


Posted in Website Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Robert J. Sawyer – Best of the Sci-Fi Writers Series

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Vic Richardson
Robert J. Sawyer (1960- ) – A Canadian science fiction writer, Robert J. Sawyer has 20 novels under his belt and is cranking them out faster than I can keep up. I haven’t yet read his latest two books and will star rate them as soon as I am finished reading each. He is a multiple award winner with a Hugo, Nebula and John W.

Campbell Memorial Award under his belt. His books are diverse with some revolving around advanced alien contacts, others about alternate earths and still others about web technology gone awry. I have Robert J. Sawyer on my personal must-follow list.

..
..
..
..
Flashforward (2009) – The novel is based on an event where the whole world of seven billion people black out for two minutes and seventeen seconds. A lot can go wrong in two minutes and millions die as planes and cars crash, among o ther

calamities.

Also during the two minutes, everyone has promonitions of events that will happen in

their future. The rest of the book is centered around those searching to find out what caused the incident and assorted characters dealing with the psychological impact of the premonitions. A popular ABC TV series was created around this book in 2010.

...
..
Rollback (2008) – Dr. Sarah Halifax, 49, decodes a radio transmissions from aliens but no more messages come through until she is 87. Science has advanced   and there is

an experimental rejuvenation process for humans called a rollback.

Sarah and her husband both get one and he has a 25 year old’s body again but hers fails and she is left in her 80s. She continues to decode the new message while he tries to deal with his new found youth.

This and Homonids were my favorite books by this author.

..

Calculating God (2009) – A six legged alien lands outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto asking to see a paleontologist. In search of God because of experiencing cataclysmic events on it’s home planet, scientists sturggle with moral and intellectual issues in dealing with the alien.

..
..

Wake (2009) – First in a trilogy called WWW (Wake, Watch, Wonder or perhaps World Wide Web), the story centers around a blind teenage girl, named Caitlin, who has experimental implants to correct her sight but instead the implant connects her mind to the world wide web. It is displayed in colorful threads and shapes and then… an intelligent pattern emerges in the web that grows stronger with each passing day and begins to try and communicate with her.

..

Hominids (2003) – Who doesn’t like a good Neanderthal story? This thought provoking first book of a trilogy is my

all time favorite from Robert J. Sawyer. In a remote Canadian laboratory, a link to a parallel universe is found where on it’s Earth, Homo Neanderthal dominated over Homo Sapiens as they evolved. Their world is as advanced as ours, even with mind recorder implants for solving crimes, but life is quite different as they still live as hunters and gatherers in a much less populated culture.

One of the Neanderthal scientists comes through to our side by being swapped with one of our scientists and the rest of the book is about his coping with our culture, being studied by us and dealing with the accusation of the murder of our missing scientist. Did I mention that the Neanderthal falls in love with a woman scientist on our Earth?

..

Humans (2010) – This is the second book in the Neaderthal Parallax trilogy and has Ponter, the Neaderthal scientist returning from his world

along with the first diplomatic party of Neanderthals to be with his love, Mary. Lots of cultural issues ensue as Ponter deals in his way with Mary’s rapist while trying to convince her to come back to his world and be his wife.

..
..

Hybrids (2010) – Last in the Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy, both Ponter and Mary return to his world. She suffers culture shock when she has to live in the all woman cities where male Neanderthals can only visit once a month. To prevent lonliness, all Neanderthals have soulmates from both sexes.

Mary gets pregnant and the first hybrid is born, with the help of banned Neanderthal technology. Meanwhile Ponter is tried in hos home world for his crimes on the other Earth.

..

..

Factoring Humanity (2003) – An alien signal is detected from Alpha Centauri and Heather Davis at the University of Toronto, studies the signal which continues transmitting for ten years. Her estranged husband, Kyle, who works on AI machines has created a quantum computer capable of finally decoding the signal. Together they solve the mystery and the decoded messages reveal new technology designs that will advance mankind in unimaginable ways. Are we ready

?

..

Starplex (2010) -Taking a page from Star Trek, Starplex tells the tale of a future where man has developed faster than light travel through the use of wormholes and has made contact with numerous alien races. We travel the galaxy and search out new races in our star ship called Starplex. In this book, the creators of the wormhole show up to confront us in a sealed spacecraft with no windows or obvious communications means. Read about the crew of Starplex as they try frantically to the creators that “We come in peace.” before they destroy Starplex.

..

Mindscan (2005) – Jake Sullivan has a new android body with a copy of his consciousness, an option for those of wealth in a future earth. The process involves sending the flesh body with it’s original consciousness to a prison institute on the far side of the moon to live out it’s life. Jack the android meets up with Karen, who is also in a new android body, and falls in love. The story gets complicated quickly when Jack’s original body persona escapes and comes back to challenge him on Earth and Karen’s son sues her over his inheritance he did not get. A courtroom battle ensues over the fundamental rights of androids – Asimov would be proud.

..

Cued to read – I will rate them after I read them:
..
Watch (2010) – Second in the WWW trilogy, the Webmind has turned sentient and befriended Caitlin. However, the secret government agency, WATCH, has detected Webmind, considers it a threat and is in

the seek and destroy mode. Skynet is alive! (I couldn’t resist.)

..
..

Wonder (2011) – Last in the WWW trilogy, Webmind has emerged form the web and helped mankind by curing cancer and easing tensions in the world – sort of a benevolent Skynet(?). Caitlin, no longer blind, is determined to protect Webmind at all cost, from WATCH, the secret government agency bent on destroying Webmind.
..


Posted in Sci-Fi Related Posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Robert Charles Wilson – Best of the Sci-Fi Writers Series

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Vic Richardson
Robert Charles Wilson (1953-) - A Canadian author of 15 novels, Robert Charles Wilson won a Hugo award for

his novel, Spin, and has been nominated for many other awards over the years. His writing style is speculative fiction and often centers around large mysterious planet changing events and the reaction of the characters in his books to these events. His books are great reads, especially if you like advanced alien mysteries and intrigue.

As you can see by the long book list below, this writer is on my must-read list.

..
..
Spin (2005) - First in the Spin trilogy, Spin is about a temporal bubble that instantly surrounds the earth, cutting it off from the rest of the universe and causing time to move millions of times slower. A lot of the book is about diverting technology because the satelites don’t work and about trying to understand the bubble.

Characters are well developed in this book.

..
..
Axis (2007) - Second in the Spin trilogy, Axis continues the story many decades later with different characters.

It has been determined that the Hypotheticals are the alien beings responsible for the time bubble. An Earth settlement started on Mars right before the bubble appeared has advanced over 10,000 years. Martian technology is shared with Earth and then Mars gets it’s own time bubble.

..
..
Blind Lake (2003) – This fascinating book revolves around a federal research facility in Minnesota that has alien technology that lets them study a city of lobster-like aliens on a far off planet.

The US government mysteriously quarantines Blind Lake and the race is on to find out why. Something related to the alien technology is causing the quarantine.

..
..
Darwinia (1998) – This is a bizarre alternate history tale based on a 1912 incident, called the Miracle,  where a large chunk of Europe is replaced with part of an alien planet teaming with alien plants, deadly creatures and strange artifacts. The book follows the travels of young Guilford Law from America as he explores Darwinia with a doomed expedition. Can the artifacts save him in time?
..
..
The Chronoliths (2001) – A hugh alien looking monolith the size of a skyscraper appears in the jungles of Thailand with an inscription about a military victory from a warlord 20 years in the future.

The story follows software designer Scott Warden as he tries to solve the mystery. Set over 20 years time, more monuments appear and a cult forms to worship them – a cult that includes Scott’s daughter. Scott forms a group to destroy the monoliths and a battle ensues between the cult and Scott’s team.

..
..
Bios (1999) - Based in the 22nd century, mankind is exploring the faraway planet of Isis.

Teaming with diverse plant and animal life, sadly every moelcule of the planet is toxic to humans. The story centers around the newest explorer, Zoe, who has been genetically modified for a special mission on Isis. Only Zoe doesn’ t know

this yet. A series of deadly disasters occur ending with a tragic finale.

..
..
The Harvest (1992) – Mysterious aliens contact Earth for the first time and offer the gift of immortality to any human who wants it. Those that accept, leave their skins behind and go to a higher place.

Those that don’t inherit a strangely transformed Earth over the next few years.

..
..
..
A Bridge of Years (1991) - Another time travel book, A Bridge of Years is about a man named Wilson who moves into a cottage in a small town in the northwest that has not been occupied for a decade.

He discovers that it is one end of a time portal linked to New York City in 1962.

He travels through, falls in love with a Bohemian girl in Grenwich Village and is stalked by a murderer from the future.

..
..
Memory Wire (1987) – In the future, a veteran has his mind wired to be an impartial human camera that records events around him. He and a young woman go on an adventure in search of a mysterious alien artifact.

This is a very early work of Wilson’s and lacks some of the polish and suspense that his later works are famous for.

..
..
Mysterium (1994) - This book is a lot like the earlier Blind Lake but with a more direct alien threat.

A top secret government facility near the town of Two Rivers, Michigan is built around an alien artifact that was discovered there. Scientists are studying it and one night the lab lights up, creating an effect that plunges Two Rivers into an alternate world ruled by a rigid theocracy. A battle between the old and the new ensues with a climactic ending involving the artifact. This book is in the alternate history sub-genre along with S.M Stirling and John Birmingham’s books.

..
..
A Hidden Place (1986) - This is Wilson’s first book and was very well received.

Centered around a depression era farming community and several “different” humans with special powers living among the rest. The different humans must meet up and transform themselves. The book has a lot of human conflict, escape sequences and an excellent snapshot of life in a small community in the depression era.

..
..
Julian Comstock – A Story of 22nd Century America (2009) – This is a post apocalyptic tale, based in 2172 after oil is gone, the cities have fallen and plagues and false tribulation has occured.

Armies are conscripted forcibly from farming communities for a battle between the Dutch and the Canadians who currently control North America. I bet you didn’t see that one coming. The main character, Julian, is secretly related to President Comstock but wants to fight in the war as an ordinary soldier to prove his worth. There are lots of battle sequences in this fine thought provoking book.

..
..
Vortex (2011) - As a sequel to Spin and Axis, Vortex is split between a time a generation after Axis and one 10,000 years in the future. Hypotheticals that created the time bubble commune with humans to fulfill their destiny after characters from the present travel forward in time. All the mysteries are explained and the trilogy gets closure by the end of the book.


Posted in Sci-Fi Related Posts | Tagged , | Leave a comment