Sticks and Stones

HarperCollins, following in the footsteps of one of its authors: Paulo Coelho, will begin making some of its books available for free online. These books are not downloadable, will only be available for one month, and can’t be printed out. DRM is not dead in all forms of digital media yet.

The New York Times reports that this will begin today. Books available:

“The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

I thoroughly applaud HarperCollins for making these books available online not because books need to be free but because books need to be available. Here in North London we have a library. It is somewhere in this area, although none of the residents seem to know where it is. It is small, and the one and only time I went in there, was stocked with Friends DVDs and racks of self-help books.

Harper Collins can spread the joy of high quality fiction by putting its content on what is slowly being recognised by ‘old media’ as the distribution mehanism of the future: the internet. The popularity of Audible, Sony’s eBook and the Kindle all demonstrate that digital distribution of books is not the far-off-future, but the present. It is good to see HarperCollins joining in.