"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for

an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed.)

Come join us in this ever-expanding collective worldbuilding effort. Within the vast universe that is Orion's Arm you will find:

* Hard Science

* Plausible Technology

* Realistic Cultural Development

* A vast Setting

* 10,000+ years of historical development

* Realistic Exobiology

The xISBN Web service supplies ISBNs and other information associated with an individual intellectual work that is represented in WorldCat. Submit an ISBN to this service, and it returns a list of related ISBNs and selected metadata.

Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling; the merchant cartels want her head; the star-conquering, so-called "Republic" of Haven is Up To Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over-age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system.

But the people out to get her have made one mistake. They've made her mad.

This restriction makes Amazon the prime market for book publishers. How can they resist giving over their entire catalog to a store that attracts so many eager, captive shoppers? Publishers' acquiescence in turn increases the Kindle's appeal to new buyers. If you're in the market for an e-book reader, you'll probably choose the one that offers the most books, and that means Kindle.

Lulu gives you all sorts of ways to sell your fabulous new creation to the whole wide world - you set your own price, we print and ship each item as it's ordered, and you collect 80% of the creator revenue on every sale.

"Cosmic AC," said Man, "How may entropy be reversed?"

This article, which focuses on scanning books, describes the steps you need to take to prepare pages for optimal OCR results, and compares various free OCR tools to determine which is the best at extracting the text.

BookLamp.org is a system for matching readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music.