By the book

February 15, 2006 4:51 PM

HarperCollinsis the first major publisher to give away an entire version of a new book online, revenue being raised through Yahoo! ads. But they don't seem to be 100% committed - if you go to their website you can pay $18.26 for the e-book and no mention is made of it being available free at the author's own website. [Appropriately the book, "Go it Alone" by Bruce Judson is about entrepreneurial ideas]
posted by meech (6 comments total)

I applaud their effort but putting each page on it's own web page is not very fun to read. They even split sentences between pages, like a real book. I guess they didn't typeset it again.
posted by smackfu at 5:55 PM on February 15, 2006

Ugh! Good thing Acrobat can convert this into a single .PDF file for me.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:12 PM on February 15, 2006

I'll wait for the movie. Actually it's currently in production as we speak and should hit theaters (and be released on DVD) by next week.
Destined to be a Turner Classic by end of spring.
posted by hal9k at 7:19 PM on February 15, 2006

The HarperCollins site features some true ebook formats (.lit, .pdb), while the author has the book online in HTML. And for the record, a PDF is not really an ebook format, no matter how Adobe tries to spin it; still, I suppose that it's more convenient than HTML, especially if you want to take it mobile. HC did leave out a big format, .prc for Mobipocket Reader.
posted by TrinityB5 at 8:24 PM on February 15, 2006

I bought this damn book in a store, and I'm pissed off that they're now giving it away for free (mostly because it wasn't that great a book anyway). I'm gonna download a pdf of a HarperCollins book from a p2p site to even things out a bit.
posted by bashos_frog at 8:33 PM on February 15, 2006

"HarperCollins is the first major publisher to give away an entire version of a new book online"

Well, except for Tor, and Ace.

But I guess because they publish science fiction they don't count.
posted by jscalzi at 5:50 AM on February 16, 2006