Technology progresses and a new generation is born growing up with little more than inkling of the modes of life preceding the convenience of torrenting and the iPhone. The internet has made the dream of free content (whether legal or illegal) a reality and once you give a mouse a cookie, an entire world of products is expected to come for free, too. It’s only natural. In a capitalist society, the center of our concerns is money; how to get more of it and how to spend less of it. And now, a precedent for access to free content has been set. The music and film industries have fought against “piracy” on the internet, the illegal downloading of albums and dvd rips. Why should anyone ever buy a cd? or a $20 dvd when, with a little patience and the right program, one can download the file and watch it on their laptop?
With the book industry, the approach has been quite different as of late. Amazon offers a number of free e-books. Websites like Project Gutenberg have created a store of online books that are public domain. And now, authors are posting shorter works on Facebook and Twitter. In this week alone, GalleyCat has posted articles that R.L. Stine posted a mini horror story on Twitter and Alex Epstein wrote a collection of stories in Hebrew (partially translated here) posted as an album of photos on Facebook.
Maybe all of this voluntary free content/product will break the foundation of capitalism itself and America will experience a complete economic turnover? You never know.
GalleyCat is clearly into free content. They posted links to download 7 free e-books that inspired the late David Foster Wallace. He would have turned 50 today. If you haven’t read any of DFW’s quirky and extremely intelligent writing, you should!
I, too, love free things. But I still will probably never stop loving this (i.e. real you-can-hold-them-in-your-hands books– on awesome shelving!).
Your New Beau.
Tags: e-books, Galleycat