A Great Source for Free and Open eBooks
August 9, 2008 – 10:50 am by Thomas GideonI have been trying to resist using my iPod Touch for much more than music playing as I am a recovering PDA addict. However, recently its potential for reading e-books has been revealed to me through a nice little (non-free) app, Annotater. Honestly, I installed it more so I could share e-book versions of technical books for reading on my daily ride on the local commuter rail. I will admit to experimenting with some titles on Project Gutenberg with middling success. (I devoured all of Burroughs’ Mars titles from there on my last PDA some years ago.)
I was understandably intrigued when I saw a review on Wired for another e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a free one called Stanza. It is roughly comparable, only lacking a few features that Annotater provides but possessing one that prompted me to share some thoughts.
What makes Stanza stand out is its integration with a site about which I am honestly surprised I had not heard previously, Feedbooks.
Feedbooks was founded in June of last year and provides a simple yet powerful service. At its core, the site offers the ability to generate PDF formatted electronic books on the fly from a variety of sources for just about every e-book reader on the market. You can also build a variety of different views into your books of interest as RSS feeds. Hence the name of the site.
Feedbooks republishes titles from Project Gutenberg making them easy to search and format for whatever device you posses. They also seem to have a considerable body of CC licensed books, most notably almost all of Cory Doctorow’s works. Authors can also publish their own books through the site. I am not sure if they offer explicit licensing support to authors doing so since I don’t have a title I can publish to test it. They offer a little bit of guidance to the reader on applicable copyright for books in their catalog though I wish they’d expose CC-licensed works more clearly. They do not appear to be using the CC badges and RDF metadata which would seem to be a natural fit with the site. It is early days for Feedbooks so maybe they will add that feature at some point.
You can also create customer newspapers based on existing RSS feeds. I use Bylines on my iPod Touch but for a device that doesn’t have a decent RSS aggregator application available, this feature may be of interest. It seems similar to how the Kindle handles RSS subscription from what I have read about that device.
Feedbooks seems like a great way to consume free and often public domain or openly licensed books for those of us with portable devices and they have done a remarkable job of supporting just about every reader available. For independent authors, they also offer a venue worth considering if you are already making your works available as free PDFs. If they have or add explicit Creative Commons license support, all the better.
