Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

More free-book madness. For the next month, you can read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free–as long as you don’t mind sitting at a computer with a live internet connection. On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow (Overclocked) gives it a bad review (the interface, not the book). Gaiman responds to that and another charge, as well:

I was surprised by a few emails coming in from people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away — the idea being, I think, that by handing out a bestselling book for nothing I’m devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly.

…

This is how people found new authors for more than a century. Someone says, “I’ve read this. It’s good. I think you’d like it. Here, you can borrow it.” Someone takes the book away, reads it, and goes, Ah, I have a new author.

Libraries are good things: you shouldn’t have to pay for every book you read.

(Read Booklist’s review of American Gods.)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Bookselling, Electric Libraryland, Publishing, Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.