This website has long advocated digitizing books and making them available on line, at either low prices or free. I would be curious to know if that happens very often. I stumbled on one, the Wiley - Ubuntu Linux Bible at link here.

It is also available from Wiley for $39.33 in hard copy. I think it may be available as a free download for only a limited period of time. The book comes with a CD but Ubuntu will mail you one for free or you can download it, burn a CD and then install it.

This move by the Ubuntu distribution to promote the use of its linux-based operating system reflects an interesting business model, one in which sale of the software is secondary and primary is the sale of follow-on services. But it all depends on the spread of linux, which has had an uphill battle with Microsoft.

I think it's pretty common; see links to economics (and stat) at EconLog, Online Textbooks and more generally at UPenn's digital library. That does include a Debian book (Ubuntu being an offshoot thereof.) Also maybe note the annoying-but-useful 2020ok.com. Two of my own Java-etc. books (co-authored with Sasha Nakhimovsky) are available free from APress. (Sasha wanted them to be available for students at U.of Kabul, and the response was "how about more generally?" They're getting out of date, of course.)

I think your link is messed up. Also, I did a little web searching and it appears that the e-book is an unauthorized version.

Apart from that aside, I am curious what the effect Ubuntu is having on the sales of Apple computers. Both Ubuntu and Apple pride themselves on being cool and trendy so it would seem that while they are both obviously chipping away at Microsoft their target audiences are very similar.

I'm not sure what your problem was with the link. It takes you to http://depositfiles.com/en/files/670064?# You click Download on the Free column and that takes you to another page where you have to wait 30 seconds or so. Then you may get a popup that you close and eventually it starts to download. I had no trouble. I cannot speak to the issue of whether it is unauthorized. If it were, I assume Wiley would ask that it be taken down.

I am grateful for all the links for free books on line. I have of course used Gutenberg for books that are out of copyright, but my curiosity was about books that are in copyright.

David Levine has been interested in this for a long time. If I understand him correctly, he thinks that texts that are free and digitized can be constantly revised, a la Wiki, and that their freeness will drive out the bad texts that are often what students are compelled to buy.

Yes, textbooks seems to be especially hurt by copyright. Every author tries to get a share of the lucrative monopoly by writing a textbook that's just a little different than the best-selling one. A superior model would be a small number of books that many people can improve upon over time - as John says, a wiki for textbooks. I have a bit of information about the situation here

Something like http://wikibooks.com ?

The site where I first learned of the downloadable version of the ubuntu book, link here now has heard from Wiley, and posts this: "Sorry all - the book's publisher let us know that this download isn't on the up and up, so this post has been removed."

I wonder what "isn't on the up and up" means, more than that Wiley objects? I just checked again and it is still available through my original link. One other warning--to download, be sure to enter the anti-spam code number; otherwise nothing happens. Others seem to have had trouble following the directions, which I must say, aren't instantly clear. Persist!

My apologies, my previous comment on the link being messed up was inaccurate. What is accurate is that for some reason the firewall my work didn't like it. The link, however, worked like a charm from my home pc.

I don't know how common it is for copyrighted works to be included in the free downloads, but my own two that I mentioned above are certainly copyrighted, and as APress says, their freely downloadable books are also available for sale in print. (The downloadables are supposedly print-disabled PDFs, so there's some value retained.) In the realm of fiction, I'd suggest looking at the Baen Free Library; I hope they're collecting data, but apparently they've been collecting money; see discussion at Scalzi's whatever blog, as well as Scalzi's prior experience.

It's hard to generalize, though, not only for Scalzi's reasons (contrasting his own experience with Cory Doctorow's) but because there are different kinds of authorship: I would like to distinguish between direct financial compensation from royalties, indirect financial compensation from improved visibility, and non-financial compensation, e.g. community service and/or advocacy. Naturally, the latter motives are more amenable to mixing with David Levine's sort of proposal.