Creative Commons Licensed Works

All the books on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) license. We encourage readers to take creative license with all of the books on this page and look forward to hearing from readers and remixers. We also encourage readers to support the publishers who are taking part in this grand experiment and, if appropriate, buy the paper editions. The books below are provided in low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text formats. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. We’ll happily host, credit, and add your conversion to the file list below. Please abide by these few rules for file-conversions:

• Send us a link to the reader for your conversion so that we can include it on the downloads page.
• No DRM. We have no interest in DRM. If your format of choice has a means of restricting copying, use or playback, please do not use it.
• If the book has been converted to your format of choice but the conversion doesn’t suit you, go ahead and reconvert it for your own use and distribution. We will host the first (and only the first) version as the few formats we have provided are pretty much all we know anything about.
• Enjoy!

FAQ (ca. 2005)

1. Why?

We love books. We want to keep on publishing good books. Weird books. Interesting books. We are curious about the future. If everyone downloads books straight to the Kindlenub in their head, we might be in trouble. But if there are still people who like to read books on paper, maybe some of them will read some of these downloads and then decide they would like the actual books. Therefore we’re releasing some of our books

also releasing it as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM).

2. Creative What?

We’re interested in spreading the word about Creative Commons. Copyright is a good thing and artists deserve to be paid whatever society is willing to pay for their work. But, do artists need to retain the rights to their work for 70 years after their death? Uh, no.

3. Can’t I buy the book?

Yes, we certainly encourage readers to buy the book — we’re a tiny independent press. We receive no grants, we’re not a nonprofit: sales are good!

4. Will giving this book away kill sales?

We don’t think so.

60,000+ people have downloaded Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen since we made it available under Creative Commons. In the meantime the book has gone into its sixth printing, has been translated into more than half-a-dozen langauges, is being taught in many schools, and is still being passed hand to hand to new readers.

Our books are available in hundreds of libraries, on books.google.com and Amazon.com’s Search Inside program, in a few used bookshops, on BookCrossing, Scribd, Teleread, and, again, in hundreds of libraries.

In other words: as with any book, if you want to read it for free, you can. We’ve just made it easier for this book to reach the 6 billion readers out there!

4. Questions

Got a question? Email us and hopefully we’ll post an answer. We are a tiny press, though, so please don’t get jumpy if we don’t answer immediately. We’re busy working on our next books, freelancing, or performing quality control on chocolate.

More thanks:

• Much of the impetus, information and inspiration for using the Creative Commons license came from author, innovator, and groundbreaker Cory Doctorow. (Thanks, Cory!)

• Thanks also to our webhost Utopian.Net (run by artists for artists) for help with this project (and being great hosts!).

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Donate?

A number of readers pointed us toward Jim Kelly’s great page of Free Audiobooks and suggested we add a donation button.

Please note: this is not something you have to do (especially if you own the book!). The electronic editions above are Free — and one of hopefully many Creative Commons-Licensed Free Downloads we’ll release (check for updates).

You can buy the book at the following spots: Paypal | mail order | Our local bookshop | Powells | Direct: 800-729-6423. If you donate below, we’ll send you a thank you email but nothing else (well, unless you go wild!). We’re an indie press, hoping to survive, bent on publishing the best books we can find and in no way a 501(c)3 or whatever kind of non profit. We want to make a living publishing good books and pay authors and artists decent money along the way. We are ‘for profit’ even if that’s more of a conceptual aim than an actuality as yet.

So thanks for reading. It’s a noisy world and we appreciate the time you took getting here. Enjoy the book, spread it far and wide, come back sometime, and if you really want to, go ahead and donate: