DailyDirt: Publishing Digitally (For Free!)
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Publishing content digitally is a topic that comes up around here fairly regularly. If you’re a longtime Techdirt reader, you’ll know that we generally think digital publishing drives down the price of content to free (but that doesn’t mean your work is worthless!) and giving away content is often a very effective promotional tactic for selling other things that can’t be freely copied. Here are just a few interesting examples of free content you can peruse at your leisure.
- Novelist Teju Cole surprised some folks by releasing a new short story of his on Twitter, using retweets only. The story, titled ‘Hafiz’, is now available (for free), and it poses some interesting questions over who owns the work. [url]
- If you have a Kindle, here’s a link to a list of public domain books, sorted by author last name. This list is compiled from an ebook index of Project Gutenberg books, and there’s also an EPUB version available (for non-Kindle users). [url]
- All sorts of people post answers to questions on Quora, so wouldn’t it be nice to read a compilation of some of the best responses in one huge book? Quora released a free pdf of over a hundred answers from 2010-2012, covering 18 different question categories and including answers from anonymous users as well as Jimmy Wales. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: books, ebooks, free, kindle, media, public domain, publishing, quora, sir, teju cole, tweets
Companies: quora
Comments on “DailyDirt: Publishing Digitally (For Free!)”
If you are publishing for free, you must be stealing from someone. Damn publishing pirates.
Re: Re:
Indeed, why, think of the middleman/gatekeeper, if they can’t get a hefty cut from the author’s work, or a transfer of ownership in return for their ‘help’, they might have to get an actual job, not just leech from someone else!
So please, think of the gatekeeper, don’t use free or alternative publishing, lest they be forced to actually do real work, and find a real jobs!
Re: Re:
Lots of companies publishing for a fee are robbing the authors from beyond the grave.
The authors negotiated a fee with them in exchange for them being allowed to leech on the author’s future influence and cultural heritage for a limited time.
The companies have subsequently paid the lawmakers in order to renege retroactively on that deal and let the authors disappear into oblivion.
That’s stealing. And it is stealing the only thing that the authors still have: their posterity.