Free Books, Why Not?

At the risk of spoiling it, here is the two-bullet version of what it took me eight years to figure out:

  • A free license is not just a different way to distribute the same product; a book with a free license is a fundamentally different product.
  • Free books beget more free books in a way that conventional books don’t. Free books turn readers into writers.

Free Books, Why Not? http://greenteapress.com/free_books.html

FREE! That’s Right, I’m Giving Away MILLIONS of FREE Microsoft eBooks again! Including: Windows 10, Office 365, Office 2016, Power BI, Azure, Windows 8.1, Office 2013, SharePoint 2016, SharePoint 2013, Dynamics CRM, PowerShell, Exchange Server, System Cent

Eric Ligman, Microsoft Director of Sales Excellence Blog

Source: FREE! That’s Right, I’m Giving Away MILLIONS of FREE Microsoft eBooks again! Including: Windows 10, Office 365, Office 2016, Power BI, Azure, Windows 8.1, Office 2013, SharePoint 2016, SharePoint 2013, Dynamics CRM, PowerShell, Exchange Server, System Cent

Calibre breakthrough: Convert sideloaded e-books to the new Kindle KFX format offering enhanced typesetting – TeleRead News: E-books, publishing, tech and beyond

A new Calibre plugin lets you read many sideloaded books in Amazon’s KFX format—on your recent Kindle. Enjoy dropped caps, hyphenation, better kerning.

Source: Calibre breakthrough: Convert sideloaded e-books to the new Kindle KFX format offering enhanced typesetting – TeleRead News: E-books, publishing, tech and beyond

Are e-casebooks doomed by perceived shortcomings of e-books generally?

Can these obstacles be overcome? It doesn’t seem likely. While e-books are great for keyword-searching and access via tables of contents, for tasks that require flipping back and forth and finding the right page in a hurry, they’re not so great. While e-books do have the convenience of instant access and search capability, they will probably always be better-suited to mass-market fiction that is meant to be read in a linear fashion, rather than textbooks and reference material that needs instant random access.

— Sometimes e-textbooks come up short – TeleRead News: E-books, publishing, tech and beyond http://www.teleread.com/sometimes-e-textbooks-come-short/

I think the reason e-textbooks (and e-casebooks in my world) come up short is because they merely replicate print in an electronic format. These resources attack print typically on price and weight, 2 attributes that have nothing to do with the information being delivered. The potential for electronic educational materials is practically limitless but publishers and even authors are focused on recreating print.

Think of the first automobiles. They were referred to as horseless carriages for a reason, many designs were engines dropped into horse carriages. And that didn’t really work out, did it? It took many years and a lot of development to break the idea of copying carriages and come up with what we now know as the automobile.

E-books are still in the horseless carriage phase of development, everything getting forced into the tired metaphor of a book. We need to break free of the limits imposed by the book and push development of these educational resources into the future. The tools exist to do all the things we want to do with e-casebooks, we just need to use the tools and let go of the past