I have noticed that a lot of online ebook stores have the nerve to try and charge as much as $10 each for ebook versions of books that are out of copyright, and thus to be found legally free on many honest on-line ebooks sites, so if you simply go to a site such as one or other of the two Gutenbergs you can download them perfectly legally for nothing at all – which is how it should be.

Different countries, different copyright laws:

As the majority of online ebook sites are based in the USA just now, obviously American copyright laws pertain to them, which I believe have copyright for about 70 years after the death of the author, but there are plenty of sites on line that are registered in other countries, who have much more sensible copyright laws.  In Australia for example it is 50 years, so basically anything written up to 1963 is now out of copyright in Australia and can legally be given away on sites such as Gutenberg Australia.

So it is well worth checking on the original date of publication before parting with good money for an ebook….   if it was written 50 or more years ago you can probably find it for free somewhere on the net, and the only laws you might possibly be breaking might be your own countries laws if you are unfortunate enough to live in the USA that is.

What is the point of long copyright periods?

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Kids should read or be read to, this is a given in my view, so where can you get good, cheap and gripping ebooks for your kids?  I shall be looking at a number of good online sources of ebooks over the next three days that your kids will love.

Image thanks to the Guardian Newspaper

The really young.

I shall start with a  good source of ebooks that you can read to your very youngest kids, a publisher who produces and sells ebooks that are aimed at kids in the 2 to about 5 age range.

These will to a degree be more or less interactive, as one of the real advantages of ebooks over their paper cousins is that they can have sounds, videos and other forms of useful and entertaining extras, which if done with care can enhance the pleasure our smallest readers can get from having these ebooks read to them.

But not only interactive.

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After I wrote that post about Txtr turning into yet another online ebook store the other day, I came across a post that pointed out that they had also managed to be the people who sell ebooks for more money than anyone else.

I hadn’t bothered to check the prices they were charging in comparison to other major online ebook stores, but Michael Kozlowski of Good Ereader had taken that trouble , and come up with some interesting figures as a result of that work.

It transpires that they have managed to set quite a few of their prices as much as 60% higher than anyone else, reaching the dizzy heights of as much as almost $40 for an ebook!!!

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Some time ago we were all excited about the promised arrival of an ereader that would cost us about $10, the Txtr Ereader.  Well after the initial excitement we discovered that in fact it was nothing more than a simple device for displaying images and would only be that cheap if we bought it from our Smart Phone operators, as it needed to be connected to a Smart Phone to download the images so that we could read them.  The idea being that our ebooks would be converted to image files (one image per page), so we could read them on our little Txtr “ereader”.  So, that was the first disappointment.  We needed to have a post paid contract with a Smart Phone service in order to use this gadget, and then it had to be with one or other Telecom company who had entered into a contract with Txtr….   Sadly none did as far as I know.

Next we heard that they had decided to simply sell the thing in ordinary shops, at about $60 a pop.  We now entered the realms of idiocy, a device that could only hold 5 “ebooks”, was about the size of a mobile phone, showed images that could in no way be adjusted  (no increase in font size, note making or any of the other things we can do with a real ereader), for about the same price too… daft.

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In my continuing search for free or at least cheap legal ebooks I think I have found a good one here.  Bookrix offers a very wide range of ebooks for you to download, some free, some you have to pay for.  However, most of the ones you have to pay for are very reasonably priced, with most costing between $0.99 to $8.00.

The free ebooks seem to be in ePub format for the most part as far as I have been able to tell, and the ones you have to pay for come in a whole range of formats.     They offer two methods of downloading them, either directly to your computer, or directly to your iPhone or iPad, which is rather neat I feel.  Oh, and you can also read them online on their site if you prefer as well.

It isn’t necessary to register with this site to buy or download their ebooks, with  the free ones you can download them directly from Bookrix, and for the ones that are not free, you are offered the links to the online ebook stores where you may buy the ebook you have chosen.   In other words, Bookrix can’t actually sell you any ebooks, but gives you the specific links to that ebook at Amazon, iBooks or whoever it is who actually can sell it to you.   So for ebooks you have to pay for, they simply serve as a convenient search engine for ebooks, saving you the trouble of wandering around in a load of different online ebook stores.

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Worldreader, who are busy in a number of African countries bringing ereaders into poor rural schools have just announced the formal launch of their ebook App Worldreader Mobile to bring free ebooks to Feature phones.

Since the beta launch of this App, almost half a million people in  Africa and India have downloaded the App and have been devouring free ebooks at a rate that is almost impossible to imagine.  Literally tens of thousands of ebooks have been downloaded and read on these relatively simple 2G mobile phones thanks to this App.

Young girl reading an ebook on her mother’s mobile phone

Worldreader have put together an informative PDF that explains exactly what has happened with all relevant figures, which you can read by following this link.   This is a 25 page document, simply bursting with information.. and very well worth reading if you want to see how such a relatively simple idea as this App can totally revolutionise the lives of people who otherwise would have no access to reading.

I read this document with fascination and happiness, to see such an amazing take up of an idea is enormously encouraging, and totally validates the work that Worldreader have been doing for the last couple of years in Africa to bring literature to poor communities in a totally practical and realistic fashion.

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