E-books: more common?

[catsittingstill]

I have just downloaded _On the Origin Of Species_ by Charles Darwin from manybooks.net.  Richard Dawkins said he was a good writer (though my Dad thought he was awful; we'll see whose taste more closely matches mine), and I have the bookmark and it's free and easy, so why not?  If I don't like it, I'll just delete it; no harm, no foul.

In the process, I looked at my Firefox list of recent downloads and noticed four free e-books/stories downloaded just this afternoon.   One is from Tor Book's new website, which is giving away free e-books as a promotion; two are from Fictionwise.com, which is giving away free copies of Nebula Nominees as a promotion; and the last is Darwin's opus.

Now I'm wondering--is there a big upsurge in the availablity of e-books?  Or are they just crossing my personal horizon more because of the e-book-related Web pages and blogs I've been reading?

Comments

[pondside.livejournal.com]

We got hooked when Joe Bethancourt was here at Pondfilk III and was showing us his rocketbook. ebookwise/rca etc. That was err 2003? Baen Books and usenets binary groups were our source back then.

As more useable (i.e. not just PDA) size readers came on the market it's been growing. Kindle has raised the awareness quite a bit but we still love ours and have contaminated Stephen :).

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I've seen the eBookwise--I think it's still being made. It looks like a very reasonable machine. I'm holding out for eInk, but don't have the money for it right now. Waiting may be all for the best anyway--prices come down, new options become available... we'll se.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

The Gutenberg people have been around for ages, for the stuff so very old that even the USA considers it public domain (into which category Darwin's works would fall). It's been reasonably common for book-length documents of various kinds to be released as PDFs by various government agencies or non-profit organizations for quite a few years now. For those cases, the piracy/business model questions don't apply.

That said, we may be seeing just recently more promotional giveaways from for-profit companies, as opposed to just a few of those (Cory Doctorow, Tor).

In the last few years I've purchased a very few e-books from the very few people experimenting with selling plain, no DRM, no special hardware/software required documents. Maybe we'll see more of that, too?

I know having this giant computer monitor that can easily display a full page at once sure helps, too. Those are becoming a lot more common.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Personally I don't like reading off a computer screen; I actually prefer reading off my PDA. But this seems to be a matter of taste.

I've bought some of Baen's e-books too.