So a few months back I spent some money and finally bought a Kindle
. It was one of then new Ad supported models. While I have bought a few books for it I’v mostly been stocking it up free books from the Gutenberg Project, I’ve got the complete Sherlock Holmes, most of Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ Barsoom/Mars series, which I first read back in Jr High and a few other works.
Then a couple of weeks ago I was listening to Security Now on the TWiT network and Steve Gibson talked about how he had gotten in to one of my favorite Sci-Fi series, the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. During the discussion about them Steve mentioned that the first two books were available for free from the publisher Baen Books.
I had totally forgotten about one of the best resources for Free Sci-Fi and Fantasy, the Baen Free Library. In a world where media companies are trying to lock everything down with DRM and suing everyone in site Baen is on of the good guys. Jim Baen the publisher’s founder not only was one of the earliest proponents of ebooks and web publishing he was also highly critical of DRM, seeing it as harmful to publishers, authors and readers.
So I headed over there and got the fist two Honor Harington books ’cause after listening to Steven talk about them I decided to start reread them and downloading them to the Kindle would be quicker and easier then figuring out in which box I had put the paperbacks.
Baen Books puts up a rotating line up of DRM free ebooks in the Library for you to read either online or to download in most popular formants, be it Kindel, Nook or Sony. Most of the books up for free are the first couple of book in bigger series. This give you the chance to ‘dip your toe’ into a series and find out if you like it. But as anyone who reads a lot will tell you once you find a series you like your going to buy the whole thing and look for other books by the same author.
So if you’re into Sci-Fi or Fanstay check out Baen’s Free Library there is sure to be something there you’ll like.
