booktwo.org

I’ve long been a fan of Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials magazine, an occasional, elegant, high quality and free literary journal – except that I have a huge problem with its attitude.

Five Dials is only available as a PDF, intended, say HH, to be “downloaded, printed out and enjoyed (we hope) away from the computer”. Well, bah. Not only do I think it disingenuous to use the internet for your distribution while so pompously thumbing your nose at it, PDFs are horrible on screen, and I don’t have a printer capable of rendering them any better, nor the…

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I’ve been thinking about “Free” again, in the context of, well, art. Specifically books of course, but lets look again at some other spheres of free.

With all the discussion of what Free means, we haven’t been talking a lot about perfectly viable models of Free that are happening right now. Newspapers and music occur to me as the big ones.

I don’t know if the Metro, London Lite and thelondonpaper are profitable or sustainable. But they do seem to be working right now. And this is pretty interesting. So’s the fact that increasing numbers of people…

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So, Peter noticed something quite interesting. His attempts to download Radiohead’s In Rainbows failed – he logged in, paid, requested a download key, it never arrived – so he dropped them an email.

After a quick and entirely automated exchange, they gave him an email address to write to for a new authentication key: downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com.

Drop a blank email to that address and they’ll send you a download link – no honesty box, no email registration. Just the music.

What’s interesting is that they don’t do any checks on this email. They appear to have…

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