From Paul Wilson:

• Baen.com
• Red Books
• Deisel
• Free Online Novels
• Cory Doctorow

From Ronald Snijder:

• OAPEN partners

Here are some others I stumbled on to while perusing the above links:

• The Book Depository
• Book Rags: This site has books, study guides, and lesson plans along with much more
• Public Bookshelf for romance novels
• Free Books, specializing in audio books
• Free eBook of the Day
• Literature Masters for free online novels
• 10 Free Science Fiction Books Online
• Small Beer Press

These are just a selection of site. There must be hundreds of sites offering free eBooks or free online books.
Happy reading

The project is great for accessing text files of books. Any one can take the text and format it in any way they want. The books can’t be sold for their interior – that’s free. But a book that has been cleaned up, reformatted, and published can be sold. Amazon has some of these books for a really low price of $2.00. But if they are for free on the Project Gutenberg site, why should I have to pay for them?

There is lies the problem. The formatting provided by Project Gutenberg is not always the most appealing presentation. Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott is a good example. Within the body there are numerous references and citations, along with explanatory notes. The version provided by Project Guttenberg has the notes, citations, and references running in the body text instead of being called out. That level of reformatting took 8 hours.

The moral of the story is, there’s no free lunch. Either you take the free file from Project Guttenburg and deal with the lack of formatting, or you reformat it yourself.

Take a look at these two. You can decide which you like better and choose accordingly. For now, French Creek Press is posting the link to Project Guttenberg files and the corresponding French Creek Press of any out-of-copyright formatted ebooks. If you have a favorite book you would like to have formatted into an ebook, write a note in the comments section of this blog entry.

Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott, Project Gutenberg file:
Volume 1
Volume 2

Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott, French Creek Press ebook:
Old Mortality Vol 1
Old Mortality Vol 2

By the way, if you don’t have an ebook, you can download the free Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac from Amazon. It’s a great way to test out how you do with ebooks. The only caution I have is that reading from a computer is much harsher on the eyes than the Kindle device. I’m glad I was able to try out ebooks with no investment, and I’m even more thrilled to now have a Kindle.

I did not expect the same from Stephen King. Not many people believe that the horror genre has any merit, unless one is studying Poe. Asimov and Lovecraft are not touted as great literature. Stephen King belonged in the category of “never-admit-that-I-read-his-stuff” when I’m near a writer. And that’s a shame. The gift of time was granted to me recently – time to do only non-stressful tasks, like reading. I chose to read everything I could get my hands on authored by Stephen King: short stories, essays, novels (if you find anything, like notes or sketches, be sure to send them to me). In the middle of rereading It I stumbled upon character names right out of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county, names like Sartoris and Snopes, the irony being the characters in King’s story were African American, and the characters in Faulkner’s stories sole purpose in life seemed to be to uphold the “White” Southern institution. I really got a chuckle out of that. To read more about these influences see Faulkner Sightings, about half-way through the page. Faulkner Sightings only reports direct influence. You have to know Faulkner’s stories to see Faulkner’s incredible stream of consciousness through Stephen King’s eyes. It turns the horror genre on its head.

Then I turned on my limited literary analysis tools, limited because the only analysis class I ever took was in high school. Stephen King is only a few years older than me, ok, maybe 10 years older. I heard shades of Neil Young singing through the pros, “…out of the blue and into the black…”. Vietnam underlying everything,  the turtle under Vietnam, and the gunslinger/cow poke at the bottom. All that shaped me had already shaped King enough that he could write about it, and I could relive it.

I saw this question in my search for the Faulkner influence, “Will Stephen King ever be part of the American Literature Canon?” If he does not enter that hall of American lit it will be because people cannot get past the “horror” angle. That’s unfortunate. Stephen King is versatile, his characters live and breathe, his story lines are real enough to be truly horrible, and his mastery of human nature is spooky.

William Faulkner

With such great stories as The Unvanquished and Intruder in the Dust it is a wonder that most High School American Literature classes introduce Faulkner’s work with As I Lay Dying, a difficult stream of consciousness masterpiece. The only story on par with it (in difficulty) is Faulkner’s first novel, The Sound and the Fury. Both are incredible examples of living within the mind of the character, but perhaps the younger reader needs more context from which to read these two novels. Once the reader has Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in mind, and has read stories of the Snopes, Sartoris, and Sutpen, the reader can then understand As I Lay Dying in context.

Around the same time I discovered Stephen King’s Carrie. King was a continuation of my horror education started by Edgar Allen Poe. Alfred Hitchcock did not grab me the way King did. I read every book King published, up through The Gunslinger. And then I moved on. I thought I was grown up, and grown ups didn’t read horror. I graduated to Science Fiction, but the Dark Tower series was not sci fi, even though it had its elements as such.

Stephen King

Last fall I began reading Hearts in Atlantis,  then read through the entire Dark Tower series, went back to Insomnia, and started reading everything King published that I could find. I even paid for Under the Dome to be shipped to me instead of waiting to find it in the used bookstore.What I discovered, that I didn’t pay attention to in those younger reading years, is that Stephen King also intertwines his stories. And most of his stories connect to the area around Bangor, Maine. But even more, I found King to be a great story teller.

When I read Faulkner I see, feel life in spirals, going ever so deeper on each iteration of the story, stories within stories that connect to other stories in other books. I read “history” by following each generation to the next, from the Native American land grab through the Civil War through the First World War. King does a similar thing by connecting his worlds across 30+ years of story telling.

I’ve changed my opinion about reading horror, at least about reading Stephen King’s works. He is a great storyteller. I don’t think I would want him to visit my campfire and tell scary stories – I would be too scared. I do, however, want to read more, and reread all that I read before. He doesn’t supplant Faulkner, but I don’t know that any author will. King has taken a spot right next to Martha Grimes, whose works I read as soon as I can, including buying them first hand.

For that remaking is nothing if not a sign of the writer’s unhappiness with the unadorned world, the visceral need for escape. And though a novelist uses the palette of the world for his conceptions—the way things really do feel, taste, smell, sound, and provoke thought—the writer’s love of the quotidian is at best sketchy and, frankly, more akin to the kabbalistic concept of the yearning of the soul to free itself from its bodily shell. And so while writing—nay, all art—is also the desire to conjure, arrange, systematize, concretize, beautify, magnify, highlight, criticize, good writing will paste onto one’s cognition a subtext and ubertext for a way to sense the world. Which is precisely why books change lives. And which leads us toward the most uncomfortable conclusion of all: that it is perhaps this very fault line of tension between warring parts of the psychic whole which produces both a competent sense of reality as well as the means of its stylization which produces the stuff of good writing. The trick, of course, to being a wizard—for isn’t that the goal of all the conjuring?—is to ply your black magic while remaining a healthy citizen, to somehow live with and not at odds with your angst and resist the all-too-present allure of alcohol, women, drugs, debilitating distraction and procrastination.

Insanity is a third type of solution.

The fourth option is, as Flaubert wrote, ‘Faire et se taire,’ which means, roughly, Shut up and get on with it.

This year Frances Pinter of Bloomsbury Academic is one of the keynote speakers at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference. Just reading the first line of the blurb “Living through a time of transition is exciting, stimulating, stretching and expensive!” causes excitement. This publisher embraces future trends “experimenting with open content licensing for scholarly monographs” while maintaining a comfortable position in tradition. This promises to be a great talk.

Another keynote speaker is Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief of The Huffington Post. Just recently I talked about the influence The Huffington Post has on the future of publishing (I wonder at O’Reilly’s skill in knowing exactly what I’m looking for). “Publishers just need to find new and innovative ways to reach these digitally-focused eyeballs.” As the publishing industry free-falls, Ms. Huffington steps up with possibilities in the brave new world.

I look forward to hearing Angela Bole, Associate Director, Book Industry Study Group, Inc. speak about the eBook consumer. Allison Belan Assistant Production Manager for Journals, Duke University Press and Maureen McMahon President & Publisher, Kaplan Publishing are joining together to explore “Change”, how to drive it and achieve real lasting change.

Lisa Shannon, Associate Publisher at Wiley speaks about the transition from ebooks into training. Christine Perey of PEREY Research & Consulting brings her “18 years experience working in emerging multimedia communications markets” to speak about “augmented Reality … mixing digital information and the real world in a highly interactive manner “. They are joined by Angelina Ward, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Syngress. Ms Ward is presenting a case study about a year growing her publishing business.

I’m always excited by Adobe, and I’m sure I won’t be disappointed by Julie Baher, Experience Design Manager at Adobe as she discusses the future of digital reading. Diana Childress, Senior Director, Content Partnerships at Blackboard Inc. and Carrie O’Donnell,President at O’Donnell & Associates, LLC talk about the digital reality and whether or not digital content eases research or not.

This sample of influential women is only from one day of the three day conference. And, just as last year, I am unable to attend in person. Thanks to O’Reilly I can view all the sessions online; I “attend” a little later than everyone else.

This promises to be a great conference. Hope you can make it.

Arianna Huffington from www.ihavenet.com

Three years ago The Huffington Post, barely out of its incubator, was brushed off as a casual, digital hobby of Arianna Huffington.

By February 2010 The Huffington Post had 3.7 million unique visitors (Nielson Online). Technorati, the premiere blog search tool, has the Huffington Post as the second most linked to blog, second to TechCrunch.

The Huffington Post (The HuffPost in the colloquial) combines American “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” and “Horatio Alger entrepreneurship” with the ability to brand itself as “The Online Commentator”. So why is The Huffington Post, long on government administration critique, important to the publishing industry?

In part, the answer is The Huffington Post is redefining its role in the world as the “Internet Newspaper”, including various new fields, along with books.

As she is quoted by the New York Times, “when the posts are linked on the front page, the site provides a megaphone and gives authors some prominence. ‘We’ve been very successful in selling people’s books.’”

Take a look at the Huffington Post Book Review Roundup. Even using the conservative estimate of 10,000 viewers, a book reviewed on The Huffington Post is going to do very well.

As more and more people go to online blogs for information, Twitter for breaking news, and Facebook for recreation, The Huffington Post, avante guard of the publishing world, sets the new direction for any kind of information. Publishers, in the throws of electronic rights, in freefall as the traditional publishing world disintegrates, must pay careful attention to any innovation – especially one that is so successful.

We strolled the college’s grounds together. He admired trees, clouds, the quality of air, he admired the beauty of various coeds. He lamented the cost of writing as a hermetic closing off from romantic possibility and I could see this bothered him: read his last book, Dubin’s Lives, to find out just how much. Once, he came to my college apartment with an obscure homosexual poet and my parents to eat the lasagna and ratatouille that my roommate and I cooked for them. He took me out to dinner. He asked me if people at the restaurant were looking at him. I glanced around and indeed they were. He’d won the National Book Award; he’d won a Pulitzer; he was a famous man in this small-ish town in southern Vermont. Another time, I drove him from Bennington to his apartment on West End Avenue in the beautiful, trash-strewn City. We spoke about his privation to become a writer, spoke about his kids who were older than me. Many years later, after I’d begun my first book, he wrote me a letter that, “if you work hard enough you might make it.” And a year after the letter, he came to my wedding. He wore the plaid suit jacket of a fashionable golfer and at the celebration dinner he leaned close for a private toast and said that my wife and I were a wonderful pair.
Back at college, our writing class convened at his house for our last session, a group critique of short stories we wrote. And I remember—my romantic memory—how the house shone with light, like a spectrum of his creativity and hard work, and how his mother-in-law, an Italian woman named Mrs. Fidelman who’d become a movie star late in life, sucked on a cigarette with a long ash in his living room. That night, he criticized a girl’s story and made her cry and praised another student’s work who later became a famous seller of books and who decried in The New York Times the writer’s life as a miserable one.

“If you work hard enough you might make it.” —Words which haunt me still.

Am I working hard enough? Do I really have what it takes? —Existential worries. Worries which will never cease. But the great abiding gift he gave me was his personal example of a truly serious artist, my first and, so far, my last. He was a teacher who never spoke about technique but rather, as a secular rabbi, asked questions like, “Who are you and what do you have to say? What is your voice? How deep in yourself can you dig?” Questions which I didn’t understand then but became the very bedrock of my mind. Inchoate questions which nagged at me as I applied to the Peace Corps in Africa—a job where I could legitimately drop out of society and try to write and understand these ciphers of questions Mr. Malamud spit out like mantras. Togo had no writing teachers, no writing seminars, no writing friends. It was Writing Diaspora, a country of lousy agriculture and worse politics where the arts were not part of anyone’s curriculum and never would be. Africa was more than distant and philosophically dark as Canaan before the Israelites, physically unhealthy, a purposeful exile and arid savannah of competing life claims where I’d have to choose, as both aspiring novelist and callow young man, how best to grow up.

I started playing games with my sisters so I could have contact with them on an almost daily basis. When they sends me gifts and notes I know they are ok for that day. A funny thing happened. Through gaming I discovered cousins that I hadn’t seen or spoken with for over 20 years. I discovered cousins that I didn’t know I had. And I really like that. Social Media at its best. Then I found old friends on the same games. It recreates the gaming atmosphere of my teens when we would sit for hours playing whist and bridge.  “It’s ok not to have a lot to say. Let’s play.”

Many management courses that I’ve participated in use the game model to get the point across. Whether it is trust, conflict management, accountability, there is a game to play. Granted, these were usually done offsite, all employees of a particular group or division, similar ranking within the company. I don’t know if offsite training happens as regularly as it used to. I suspect not. It is too costly. Training now takes place online.

eLearning and its counterpart, mLearning (mobile), open up training avenues that are cost effective, easy to manage, and easy to coordinate. The individual takes a course online, tests online, and has his/her scores stored online. Management gets instant, unbiased feedback, and instant progression scores. Great. Except the community aspect of training is gone. Synergy is gone.

My question to research this year is how can we take the goodness of gaming (look at Second Life as a prime candidate) and the goodness of offsite training, mash it all together and come out with effective eLearning and mLearning systems? Is there a way to create a learning environment that lives and learns as the employee “goes up in levels”? And is there a way to instill boundaries in those games so that gaming does not become the primary focus of the employee?

It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting a baseball-large field on three sides. The fourth side had a middle distance view of the White Mountains and which ended at a small rock wall the students labeled “The End of the World”. The school resembled a Vermont village ala Grandma Moses and an atmospheric cross between a David Bowie concert, the Grateful Dead, and a 50′s beatnik hangout in the Village. It had a Black Music department, an extensive modern dance facility, no grades and no exams. Affairs were encouraged between faculty and students. Drugs, drinking, sex, various other forms of exotica, and remarkable hard work were all de rigueur.

Born in Pittsfield, one hour due south on Route 7, I was the only local at the school. The majority of the student body was from New York and Los Angeles, a smattering from Boston and Washington, a pittance from overseas. I was the country mouse to their town mice: I’d never attended private schools as they had, nor traveled, nor dressed, nor read the books nor seen the movies they’d seen. I didn’t even know what a cappuccino was. Yes, a country mouse filled with inchoate aspirations and no real sense of his own talent or predilections, a wildly desirous junior who searched for both transcendence and degradation all at once, a crazy, lusty mix of Henry Miller and the hallucinogenic and warrior ideas of Carlos Casteneda–remember him?

I wanted to live Siddhartha, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Camus, Stendhal’s Frederick Morel all at once. Dig that. The vitality, the great force which sent me to Israel then through Greece and Spain, which kept me up late at night listening to Coltrane and woke me early to my Corona electric typewriter and my first taste of extended hard artistic work–I wrote two short novels, I wrote a book of short stories–this overwrought, wild life, this angst which visited me nightly, like a centuries-wandering dybbuk which finally found its best place to rest–this gorgeous untamed energy which I only ever found one other time in my life when I was first married and found my way to yeshiva, this energy enlivened me, brightened me, the hard work enlightened me, and I had much to speak about with Nick Delbanco who turned me on to Malcolm Lowry’s “Under The Volcano”, and much to speak about with Marc Falcone, who turned me on to Charles Ives.

He was great, Delbanco, with his corduroy pants, bald pate with the long strands pasted cross-wise over it, handsome Sephardi nose, coal black eyes, and a cool and sinuous manner and way of speaking that reminded me of confidence men in grade B movies. He was patient, patient, patient with foolishness–and just how did he do that, I wonder, as I look back. And he always returned papers on time, never late, and always with more remarks and comments and good cheer than even the best of them deserved.

And then there was Falcone, whose brother, Vinny was Frank Sinatra’s band leader. Marc would do an imitation of Sinatra, where he’d pinch my cheek and spit out in this Brooklyn twang, “Love ya, kid, now get outta here.” He was swarthy, moustached, handsome, talented, my first friend who had real taste. We lived together my second year at Bennington, in Helen Frankenthaler’s old studio. He got after me to wash the dishes; he got after me to read Joyce; he did wonderful imitations of golf announcers on television; he let me bum cigarettes; he loved me like a one-year younger brother; and I just sent him my book and I still love him madly back.