free – Geek Book

FLURB, a Webzine of Astonishing Tales

Posted on 5 March, 2009 by bookGeek

FLURB is not new. Issue number 7 is now up. But it is new to me. What I’ve read so far is different, but good. The text is mixed with illustrations. You can check it out and it wont cost you more than bandwidth and time.

Suvudu Free Book Library

Posted on 4 March, 2009 by bookGeek

Random House seems to be hopping into the “give the first one away free” game. The Suvudu Free Book Library is your new place to pick up the first book from some of their Scifi/Fantasy series. I saw Red Mars over there – you can’t go wrong with stuff that solid. Just be prepared to fork over the cash when you want to keep going, and with the line up they have it’s a slim chance you wont want to.

Diamonds In The Sky

Posted on 21 February, 2009 by bookGeek

What do you get when you team up an astronomer/sci-fi author and the National Science Foundation? An anthology of free Astronomy Science Fiction stories. There are 14 stories in the collection that has been edited by Mike Brotherton They say, “The purpose of the anthology is to provide stories with ample and accurate astronomy spanning a range of topics covered in introductory courses.” and “Fans of science fiction with good science should also enjoy these stories.”

Right now the stories are all available to read on-line. There is a download tab that promises “Downloadable versions of the anthology coming soon.” I hope so, this kind of thing would be perfect to have on my phone.

Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference

Posted on 28 January, 2009 by bookGeek

The Ubuntu Pocket Guide by Keir Thomas can be purchased in dead tree form or downloaded for free as a pdf. Clicking on the title or cover pic will take you right to the page where you can get it. This page has the table of contents as well as a little more info. on the book. While I am not an Ubuntu user personally (Fedora is my preferred distro) I know there are a lot of them out there.

Kipling e-books

Posted on 24 July, 2008 by bookGeek

This is a bit of a stretch – but here is my tenuous connection. Heinlein quotes Kipling in Starship Troopers. So if you want to read more Kipling, inspired by classic Sci-Fi, download some of Kipling’s works here in html or mobi format.

The real reason I post this is just because I really like Kipling and it’s my blog. I promise I wont abuse the privilege too often.

New Tor Site – Free E-books

Posted on 20 July, 2008 by bookGeek

Tor has launched their new social, sci-fi, fantasy and much more, blogging, new fiction, super duper site. Right now there are 2 short stories up and available to read/download. They are “After The Coup” by John Scalzi, and “Down On The Farm” by Charles Stross. Both in worlds developed by the authors in full novels. Scalzi’s story is in the Old Man’s War universe and is a great read. Stross’s story is from his “Laundry” stories, which I don’t know but I liked this story. Nice mix of magic, math and computing.

On top of all that, for a limited time every ebook and piece of art they made available during their promotional period leading up to the launch of the site are all available right here. Every book is available in multiple drm free formats. I’ve read 3 so far and loved all 3. I’m working on my fourth now. There are over 20 total and so I’ll have lots of fun stuff to read for some time.

If they stick with what it says in the post – all this will no longer be available 7 days from now. They will shut it all down after the 27th. The artwork is also amazing and available in a wide number of sizes. This is when the Down Them All plugin for firefox really comes in handy. Right-Click, Save As just wont cut it for this much awesome stuff.

Foundations of Programming – Free Ebook

Posted on 28 June, 2008 by bookGeek

A few days ago Karl Seguin made available a free e-book, Foundations of Programming. The link will take you to his blog, where there are two different links for downloading the book. It is released under a Creative Commons License.

I haven’t read the book yet, but intend to do so and do a full review. I thought it would be good to point it out now for those that might want to grab it. I do know that Seguin was an MS MVP and the book is MS centric in the technologies described, code samples, etc. This may help you decide if you want to go grab it or not. It looks to deal with rather broad issues that are applicable to other languages, so I’m not saying it is useless if you aren’t using .net or something, but that is the orientation of what I saw skimming quickly over the book.

Infected – Free e-book – Update

Posted on 28 March, 2008 by bookGeek

The free pdf deal is over. Hope you got it if you wanted it.

I just found out about this and it is only good for a couple more days. I read about it over at Whatever. Scott Sigler’s Infected is available as a free download in pdf format. I haven’t read it, just downloaded it now, so I have no idea what it is like. But it is Sci-Fi and it is free. The site said the download will be available until March 31st. That’s Monday, so get hopping.

Free Sci-Fi/Fantasy E-books

Posted on 17 February, 2008 by bookGeek

If you fill out the form at Tor.com they will send you an email a week, with a link to download a free e-book from one of their authors. You also become entered in a drawing to win an Asus eee PC Galaxy. Not bad. There will be, I think, 12 ebooks total. They come as PDFs with no DRM. Nice.

I’ll have a review of the first, “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson as soon as I finish it.