Where to find free (and pirated) FBReader books. (To find the English titles, click the Roman alphabet links at the top).
I won’t download too many of these things (psst…, copyright law, etc), but I might download one or two ebooks. I see some odd titles and authors: Orson Scott Card, V.S. Naipaul, Robert Heinlein, Hugh Selby, Salman Rushdie (I’d been meaning to read Midnight’s Children), Ken Kesey, Ishiguro, John Fowles, Jeffrey Eugenides, Phillip K. Dick, Mark Hadden, Arthur Clarke. An odd mix of authors and titles (mainly because they are mainly distributing Russian language books). I don’t approve of copyright infringement. On the other hand, most of these titles sell in the used market for less than $3. It’s not that I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) spend the money. It’s the convenience factor I want, not ownership rights. (And to tell the truth, I’d rather have my own ebooks freely distributed on some international piracy site than on some DRM/commerce site. Would I pay $2 or $3 for one of those ebooks? Maybe. Would I pay 10-15$ (which seems to be the going price for 20th century fiction)? Probably not, especially because DRM is still a bother.
The problem with this site is that it doesn’t try to attract new authors (although to be fair, the Russian section might in fact do this). It really is not a tragedy to ignore copyrighted books in favor of net-savvy authors.
Here’s fbreader description in English and Roger Sperberg’s annotations about html-to-FB2 mappings. (That’s right, fbreader has its own google group and developers are developing often–on a weekly basis, it seems). Here’s Sperberg’s suggestion for FB3
On another note, I expect to publish my first ebook in a month or two. Free of course.