[Dtb-talk] Free science fiction

[Kestrell]

There is a master site called The Online Books Page which posts new etexts 
almost daily, and you can frequently find SF there which doesn't get posted 
to other places. For instance,
Vernor Vinge made his latest SF novel, Rainbows End
http://vrinimi.org/
available for free, and the Online Books Page linked to the source. Other SF 
authors such as Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross also have their free etexts 
linked from the site, and I would also highly recommend
Peter Watts' novel Blindsight,
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm .
The Online Books Page
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
New books page
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/new.html

There is also a site called ManyBooks.Net
http://manybooks.net/
which many of my friends have mentioned to me.

Kestrell
Reading in the Dark
http://kestrell.livejournal.com

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David B Andrews" <David.B.Andrews at state.mn.us>
To: <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2008 12:25 PM
Subject: [Dtb-talk] Free science fiction


> There are actually several sources of free science fiction now.  One
> is
> of course the Baen Free Library.  http://www.baen.com/  However, if
> you
> have a qualifying disability as I'm sure most people here do, you
> can
> get everything they've published electronically free in many
> formats.
> There is a link for books free to disabled readers.  You just fill
> out a
> form and will be contacted in a day or two.  I've found that .rtf
> is the
> best format to use anyway as you get better plain text conversions
> if
> saving in plain text from MS Word.  I think the html files might be
> a
> single file per book chapter which can be very big.
>
> Another free source of science fiction is Project Gutenberg.
> They've
> been concentrating on making public domain books available for many
>
> years, in fact since 1971.  However, most of the public domain
> books
> were published before 1922 until recent changes in copyright
> renewal
> policy.  Now, if works were written between 1949 and 1963 but
> weren't
> renewed, they don't have 75 year protection as they did in the
> past.
> This means that many short stories from the SF magazines are now
> free.
> You can get a science fiction bookshelf CD that contains most of
> these
> titles.  You can also browse through their author index to find
> more.
> http://www.gutenberg.org/  All files are available in plain text
> and
> html.  You probably want the 7-bit files but any text file format
> should
> work.  Another site that has similar but different content is here:
>
> http://www.gutenberg.cc/  Check out the Black Mask collection,
> especially the pulps.  There is a fairly complete Doc Savage
> archive
> unless it has been removed.  Unfortunately there is no plain text
> for
> those but html works well.  For something a bit different, take a
> look
> at the Shadow Magazine as well which should be complete.  Note that
> the
> Black Mask files might not be legal under US copyright law and you
>
> download them at your own risk.  They haven't been confirmed as
> public
> domain.
>
> One last site is Librivox.  http://www.librivox.org/  They don't
> have
> much science fiction but they have a growing collection of audio
> books
> read by volunteer, non-professional narrators.  There are a couple
> SF
> titles from the above PG site.
>
> If you have comments, please don't post them here.  Write off list
> instead.
>
> David Andrews
> Chief Technology Officer
> Minnesota State Services for the Blind
> 2200 University Ave. W., #240
> St. Paul, MN  55114-1840
> (651) 642-0513  Office
> (612) 730-7931  Cell
> (651) 649-5927  Fax
>
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