Free Books For Everyone!

Google are now giving people the ability to download entire books for free via their BookSearch facility. All non-copyrighted books can now be downloaded, which means that if you have a few reams of paper handy and are in the mood, you can now print out the complete works of Shakespeare or Dante's Inferno for gratis. A lot of publishers really hate this idea and have spoken out against it, but I'm not so sure it's a bad thing.

 

Just because someone can print out a classic at home, it doesn't mean that they'll stop buying much nicer-looking published editions from the shops. Indeed when you print something out, all you'll have is bare text on a stack of A4 paper which you'll then need to organise and bind into something a little more manageable. Somethow I can't see a nice leatherbound set of Shakespeare being replaced by a row of ring binders. And even though the text itself is free, in some (admittedly few) instances it may actually still be cheaper to buy the book than to print it out. I'm not sure how much a ream of printer paper costs these days, but a Dover Thrift edition of Huckleberry Finn costs £1.25 new on Amazon - that's still hard to beat.

 

So I don't think that cost is really the issue here - those that want to spend plenty of money on classics with lots of additional notes and commentary will continue to do so, and those who want cheap editions can still get them at the shops.  I actually see this being more useful to students and researchers and the like who need to get their hands on the whole text of a novel fast for a project or something like that. When you need to take notes and mark up a text, plain A4 is probably the way to go.

 

I think this could actually be a good thing for publishers as well as the public. As I understand it, the copyright on a book runs out 50 years after the author's death (or is it 75 years? I'm sure someone will know...), so once a writer has been dead that long, why shouldn't their work be made available free to the world at large? Publishers would certainly love to be able to keep control of everything, but how much of a hit in the pocket would they really take when a classic becomes free? They can continue to produce great-looking editions that people will want to buy, but people should be able to enjoy the option of free downloads as well if they want to. In fact I think that releasing older books into the public domain would probably force publishers to focus on new and existing talent rather than relying on the old standbys. They should be taking chances on promoting exciting new writers so that we as readers can continue to enjoy fresh talent.

 

Come to think of it, Project Gutenburg (www.gutenburg.org) already provide a library of 17,000 free ebooks whose copyright has expired, and have done for ages. I'm not sure if publishers made much of a fuss back then, but it certainly hasn't affected their profits.

 

Anyway, that's just my two cents. No doubt some enterprising people out there are already working out ways of starting a print-on-demand publishing company that will produce nice editions of non-copyrighted books for a fee. Just imagine being able to order an edition of The Illiad in your choice of cloth or leather, on your choice of paper, and even in your choice of font!  I'm sure there's tons of money to be made here somewhere...