Read Neverwhere online or download it for free
Last February, I drew your attention to Harper Collins’ free online browsing of American Gods. Well, they are doing if again, this time with Neverwhere!
You can read it for free or download it as a PDF. You don’t get to keep it forever (the PDF will self-destruct in thirty days) but it’s an excellent offering nonetheless.
I mean, I could go off on a tangent about how self-destructing PDFs is an example of “tethered appliances” taking over the Internet and taking away our control over what content we can access. Then I could casually mention Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. But I won’t.
Read American Gods online for free
As previously mentioned, Neil Gaiman and Harper Collins have put the entire text of American Gods online. You can read it for free here. 
I own a copy of American Gods, of course, so it’s redundant for me. Nevertheless, it’s extremely cool because, hey, let’s face it: it’s free stuff. And it exposes more people to Neil Gaiman and one of his wonderful novels.
So, as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation says, Share and Enjoy!™
Update (2011): People keep finding this post somehow. I suspect they are googling for “read American Gods for free” or something of that sort, to which I say: dude, local library. Book piracy is dumb. Anyway, I keep getting comments saying, “It’s not the whole book! It’s just an excerpt!” This blog post was written in 2008. The entire book was available, back in 2008, and then after a certain amount of time, they removed the entire book and replaced it with an excerpt. Deal with it.
Last updated Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 7:12 AM
Free stuff
Got your attention, didn’t I?
Neil Gaiman, one of the greatest authors of our era, is going to offer one of his books online for free to celebrate the seventh birthday of his blog. But that’s not the best part. We get to choose which book! Head on over to his blog and vote for the book you want to see online for free. Take his advice, though, and instead of voting necessarily for your favourite book, vote for the one you’d give to a friend. I just introduced a friend of mine to Neil Gaiman and lent her my copy of American Gods.
