Heh - I just discovered that very nearly the entire RCN series by David Drake is hidden in the Free Library.

The first two books are right there, on the Free Library page, in e-pub, HTML, and RTF formats, the rest are hidden, but can be found indexed on the . These hidden books are not available in e-pub, but Calibre has no problem converting (takes about three seconds.)

Jim Baen was an evil, evil man - using free books to tempt the unwary into spending their... oh, that looks good....

Seriously, have you seen his opinions on the subject? He was quite vocal on the Baen Bar:

You bought a e-book, and want to let a friend read it? Would you loan the book to someone? Then feel free to loan the e-book.
You want to share your webscription? Would you share a magazine? Then go ahead.
You want to copy the whole Free Library and put it on CD to give to your friends? The free Library is advertising - putting it on CD and giving it to your friends is free advertising. Go right ahead.

The one thing he didn't want is folks either putting the e-books up for piracy or charging money for stuff you got for free.

The net result has been my buying two hundred dollars of their e-books, soon likely to hit three hundred, most often in the form of back issues of their webscriptions. Baen Books is considered by many to be the most successful e-publisher, despite (or because of) the total lack of DRM.

Mr. Baen died in 2006, but his presence is still felt.

Thanks Jim, you have made my Kobo worth owning.

The Auld Grump

Hmmm, I haven't read any of the RCN books, but I was just perusing a couple of them on the paperbackswap site (that's how I've been getting my treeware lately, as I'm effectively broke). Thanks for the info!

Re: Jim Baen - a giant among fools when it comes to the enduring promotion. (I know that was a mixed metaphor but I thought it more apt than either of the originals.) I haven't spent quite that much on Baen books, but I've spent a lot more on them than on other publishers - probably more than all the others combined.

Re: Calibre - what settings do you use for conversion? I can't seem to get all my converted books to open on my Kindle app (some are fine, but others won't even import, and all made with the default settings).

*edit: if it matters, the reason the RCN books aren't apparent from the Free Library site isn't that they're hidden; the Wiki links go to the Fifth Imperium site (run by a fan who got Baen's permission to host the free CD contents). If you go to the main site at , you can download the whole collection of free CDs (but do try to space out your downloads, the site has gone down in the past from abused bandwidth). Both ISO and ZIP formats are available.

I use Mobi creator and only once had an issue with conversion.

I got my Kobo so that I could take it camping. It has also been handy for long bus trips.

The 3g connection on the Kindle is tempting, and if I traveled more then it might have made the difference.

So far my sources for books has been Borders, Baen, and Project Gutenberg (Mostly for Sherlock Holmes), with Baen and Gutenberg in the lead. the only downside of buying webscription back issues from Baen is that some books are in multiple issues. (Generally the ones that had ARC in the issues.)

Needless to say, B&N has not been one of the places that I buy books, I don't even buy dead tree books from them now.

The Auld Grump

Entered a contest for a Xoom at work. Not likely, but hey, free entry.

The Auld Grump, stupid contest... all members on shift entered if a 'mystery shopper' is satisfied. Whoo, I am one of eight people entered so far. (How I won the Archos I never use... or may have given away, not sure....)

I got a Kindle for my birthday, and love it more than I expected. I have a free program, calibre, running on my computer that grabs newsgroups and other sites and sends them to my kindle each morning. So I can just grab my kindle, go on errands with my kids, and if I have a down minute or two I can catch up on background reading.

That was an unexpected bonus -- I originally got calibre because I had files I wanted to convert for the kindle, and it does that well too.

Steve

As a side note - Borders and Kobo have merged their e-book stores. Kobo ran both storefronts, but for some odd reason each had books that the other lacked.

The Auld Grump