Excellent sci-fi news and fiction site Futurismic has launched a weekly roundup of free and legal science fiction and fantasy reading on the internet.  Their latest Friday Free Fiction post features Karl Schroeder, Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow and other great authors.

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Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

Award-winning sf writer Karl Schroeder has just released his debut novel, Ventus under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs license, meaning that you can download it, share it and copy it as much as you like. Karl’s one of my favorite writers in the field, and has been a pal of mine since I was a teenager — he’s always seemed to be one step ahead of everyone else (he was the first person to use the word “fractal” in conversation with me). It’s an indication of just how far ahead he is that this seven-year-old book still feels like it’s on the cutting edge, with its object-oriented sapient planet, bizarre copyright wars, and assorted grace-notes. Link

HarperCollins announced Wednesday that it had set up a special link, http://mobile.harpercollins.com, that will allow browsers to view excerpts from more than a dozen new releases, including Michael C. White’s “Soul Catcher” and Michael Korda’s “Ike,” a biography of President Eisenhower.

“Reaching consumers on mobile devices and the Internet is increasingly important for publishers,” Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said in a statement that noted the publisher has some 10,000 titles already digitized.

Several publishers have been offering content for cell phone use and the iPhone, which already allows consumers to watch videos, take pictures, listen to music and surf the Web, is an obvious outlet for an industry anxious to boost sales and keep up with the latest technology.

Link to the Yahoo News article

Note: this post is spoiler-free.

Security guru Bruce Schneier writes:

It’s online [Note: link is spoiler safe]: digital photographs of every page are available on BitTorrent.

I’ve been fielding press calls on this, mostly from reporters asking me what the publisher could have done differently. Honestly, I don’t think it was possible to keep the book under wraps. There are millions of copies of the book headed to all four corners of the globe. There are simply too many people who must be trusted in order for the security to hold. And all it takes is one untrustworthy person — one truck driver, one bookstore owner, one warehouse worker — to leak the book.

But conversely, I don’t think the publishers should care. Anyone fan-crazed enough to read digital photographs of the pages a few days before the real copy comes out is also someone who is going to buy a real copy. And anyone who will read the digital photographs instead of the real book would have borrowed a copy from a friend. My guess is that the publishers will lose zero sales, and that the pre-release will simply increase the press frenzy.

I’m kind of amazed the book hadn’t leaked sooner.

Paper-based media also has its share of spoilers and early releases:

With only two days to go before the publication of the seventh and final instalment of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, both the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun have broken one of the most stringent embargoes of recent times and published a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

After reading a copy “purchased at a New York City store yesterday”, one of America’s most influential literary critics, Michiko Kakutani, hails the volume in the New York Times as a dose of “good old-fashioned closure”.

Bloomsbury described the review as “very sad” to Reuters, pointing out that there was only one more day until the official release of the book around the world.

Link to Guardian article (some very vague spoilers, mostly about book structure/pacing)

Author Will Shetterly has released two of his books to the public in text format under a Creative Commons license - meaning they’re free to read and share.

Cory Doctorow writes:

On Tuesday, I blogged Will Shetterly amazing new American magic-realist novel, The Gospel of the Knife — now, Will has released the whole text of the novel under a Creative Commons license!

That’s just for starters: Will has also released the full text of Dogland, the book that comes before “Gospel.” This is an incredible, magical novel about a kid whose father opens a dog theme park in Florida in the 1950s, and lands his family in the middle of the segregation fight, the wonderment and despoiling of Florida, and a centuries-old mystery. Dogland is one of my favorite novels of all time, and having it online to email to people will greatly ease my task of ensuring that as many people as possible read this and have their lives changed by it.

You can read both of the books for free on Shetterly’s Blogspot site.
Links: Dogland, Gospel of the Knife (via BoingBoing)

Another author goes Creative Commons. SF author and blogger Cory Doctorow writes:

Lewis Shiner has begun to post all of his short fiction online for free, under a Creative Commons license. Lewis Shiner is one of the great science fiction writers of the last 30 years, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Glimpses (a book I’ve re-read 10 times, which haunts me every time I hear a Beatles, Beach Boys, Doors, or Jimi Hendrix song). Unfortunately, all his novels are out of print (the exception being a new audiobook, which I just ordered). He also edited a seminal anti-war science fiction anthology, When The Music’s Over that I read until it came apart. Shiner was also an early cyberpunk, who had two stories in Bruce Sterling’s ground-breaking anthology Mirrorshades

Shiner posted his fiction along with a manifesto about the collapse of short fiction markets and the importance of short fiction as a way for writers to experiment and for readers to discover new writers. He calls the project the “Fiction Liberation Front.”

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Today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, celebrated by authors giving away free, professional-quality work online in a reference to author Howard Hendrix’s controversial “webscabs rant”

You can observe it by listening to this special episode of the Time Traveler podcast on the subject of giving away your writing for free, or by downloading and reading Charlie Stross’ novella Missile Gap, released in honor of the occasion (via BoingBoing).

Previously:
April 23: International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

Edit: More great fiction up! Here and here are two free audiobooks (via BoingBoing) and here’s a list of other free fiction released for the occasion (via Futurismic).

Edit: Find more fiction released for IPSTP Day on the official blog or on author Jo Walton’s blog posting.