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[Fawfulhasfury]

What about H.P. Lovecraft and other dead writers. And if it's available for free.

[wendymaree]

Yes, these can be legal. It depends. If the copyright holders - or publishers - decide to re-release the stories of deceased authors as ebooks, then this is fine. These official releases will be available from online sources that are reputable, such as legal distributors such as Fictionwise, EbookAd , or from an epublisher. Usually illegal copies of books that have been made into ebooks or pirated copies of ebooks are given away through online Yahoo groups or places where you can download pirated stuff or private websites.

EDIT
There are many places that give ebooks away for free - and quite legally - like the Guttenborg project and Black Mask Books. It's all to do with copyright, whether the copyright has expired or not. If it has, then the book enters the public domain.

[Fawfulhasfury]

Darn it. Guess I'll have to buy them in a bookstore then. :not_ok:
Lovecraft better not be illegal. That would stink. :ranting: Maybe. :whistle:

[wendymaree]

Fawful, I did a search for Lovecraft on Project Gutenberg, (a reputable site with legal ebooks) but none of his titles came up there. But from the look of the huge number of sites that have copies of Lovecraft's work, I think it'd be a safe bet that his work is no longer copyright. But I'm no expert on this. Usually the copyright passes about fify years from the death of the author...or something like that. I'm not really sure. I think his books were published around 1920, so it's probably safe to say that Lovecraft's books are in the public domain. It can be a difficult area to know for sure. With the Peter Pan books by James Barrie I've heard the copyright is still held by a London Children's hospital.

[Kon-Tiki]

Official Lovecraft Homepage (links part here)
You can check if there're any books for free, legally, there. As for all books, I doubt it. Found some sites that let you download it for free, but they were in formats for pocket pcs and PalmOs. Besides that, there're sites like this. My guess is that some are for free, and others aren't, how strange it may be.

[Iron_Scarecrow]

EBooks I never heard of such a thing. Are all books put into this form?

Would books that aren't sold be illegal? I been looking a for a trilogy for a long time now and I can't find them anywhere in the shops.

[Eagle of Fire]

Ebooks stand for Electronic Books (same principle than Email; Electronic Mail). They are basically a text file, usually the digitized form of a already existing paper book.

[Rogue]

There was eBook reader from Adobe, where you just select the file, and reader does it's job.

When we talking about eBooks, are we talking about PDF format? :blink:

EDIT: eBook Reader

[Eagle of Fire]

Ebooks with images would probably be of pdf format, but I don't think it is necessary to be called such. Only a text file is way enough.

[Kon-Tiki]

Project Guteberg's got .txt ebooks :whistle: Turned the txt version of Sun Tzu's "The Art Of War" into pdf once to be able to print it as booklet. Was one annoying job :not_ok: