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one moment frozen in time

Haydesigner in San Diego's picture
Submitted by Haydesigner in ... on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 7:44am. ::


I am god here

Haydesigner in San Diego's picture
Submitted by Haydesigner in ... on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 7:09pm. ::

I read American Gods a few months ago, and thought it to be quite enjoyable (I believe it won a Hugo award). Well, Harper Collins is tryng out an experiment to let you read it online for free:

For the next month, your free copy of American Gods is waiting for you

Unfortunately, Cory Doctorow is not all that excited about it.

Neil Gaiman's publisher Harper Collins has put his magnificent novel American Gods online for free reading as an experiment to see free digital copies sell print books.
This is a great idea -- it's really exciting to see publishers trying to get actual data about the market, rather than simply condemning all copying as piracy and hoping that the Internet just goes away.

However, I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They've put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use.

Still, there is always that incredibly archaic option... the library (which is where I got mine).