Bradley noted in the comments for my On Balisik Station post that Baen has been making free ebooks of a bunch of their stuff available. Specifically, http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ seems to be the place to go. It seems legitimate to me too. Awesome. I still like dead tree, but this seems like a good excuse to give ebooks a try, especially for those books which are now quite hard to find, but that I want to read before I read the ones you can still get.
In the last week, I have discovered three download sites offering illegal downloads of the MythTV book e-book. If I can find three without really trying, I assume there are a lot more of them out there. This raises a question for which I don't have a good answer. Do illegal downloads of books increase, or decrease sales? I can see arguments either way, but I'm tending towards the belief that they don't increase sales. Does anyone out there have any data which isn't merely anecdotal? Want to share it?
By far the most consistent criticism of The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick has been that the sample images need to be in color. I would have to agree with this point, which is why I am delighted that Apress took the time to go back around the production process and produce a version of the ebook with color images. It's cool that they were willing to put in the effort, and not only that, they're giving anyone who has purchased the ebook to date a free upgrade. Even better, now if you buy the printed book on Amazon, you get the color ebook for free! I have a limited number of color ebooks to give away, so if you're interested please leave a comment and explain why you'd like one.
Full disclosure: I am currently writing a book for Apress. As an Apress author Apress asked me to check out the Apress e-book online catalog thingie. They threw in a free e-book as an incentive, so I thought I should give it a try. I've done a fair few book reviews for AUUG / Woodslane over the last couple of years, so it seemed like a good idea to look further into this e-book thing anyway. Especially as I have a garage full of books that I occasionally need as references, but don't have the space to store in the house, especially with two small kids who like to draw in books around. So, I picked a book in their online catalog, and said I'd like to buy it. I entered the discount code, and was good to go until they noticed that I didn't have an online account in their system. So, I had to stop my "purchase" and make one. Which meant that my place was lost in the purchase, as I had to wait for a confirmation email to arrive, and then click on a link in that email which didn't have the stage I was up…