And we like it. To celebrate the seventh birthday of his blog, the wildly inventive Neil Gaiman asked his fans to vote on which of his titles they’d like a free electronic copy of. Now that the voting is over, American Gods is available for online readers at the Harpercollins site for the month of March. Gaiman’s fourth novel tells of an epic struggle between a pantheon of dieties such as Odin, Anansi and Thoth, long thought dead but actually just lying low and doing menial jobs, and an upstart race of New American Gods – gods of television and the credit card, the Internet and the internal combustion engine.
Gaiman is not the first hugely talented author of speculative fiction to offer their work gratis. Kelly Link, Charles Stross, and Cory Doctorow are among a growing group of forward-thinking writers giving away their work via creative commons licensing. And there are other visionary organizations that have been giving books away for over a century! As Gaiman put it in a recent post on his blog: “Libraries are good things: you shouldn’t have to pay for every book you read.” Amen.
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