Leebre: a Jamendo-inspired platform for free ebooks

Com­mer­cial ebook pub­lish­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion is a crowd­ed space: Ama­zon, Apple, Google, Barnes and Noble and oth­ers each have stores and devices for dig­i­tal books, which have been see­ing con­sis­tent growth. Ebooks are undoubt­ed­ly the future of long-from con­tent. They’ve opened up a whole range of new pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for inde­pen­dent authors, and the sig­nif­i­cance of being able to self-publish books so cheap­ly and sim­ply should not be under­es­ti­mat­ed.

For the most part, the focus on ebooks has been com­mer­cial. One area that’s under­rep­re­sent­ed: free con­tem­po­rary ebooks. While many exist, and most com­mer­cial ebook stores like Ama­zon and Google Books have some free ebooks, there’s no cen­tral source for read­ers to down­load free ebooks or for authors to dis­trib­ute them under more lenient licens­es like Cre­ative Com­mons.

With Lee­bre, Michael Bethen­court — a 22-year-old free soft­ware and free cul­ture fan who grad­u­at­ed with a Com­put­er Sci­ence degree from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wisconsin-Madison — plans to change that (Bethen­court’s pre­vi­ous­ly con­tributed to open source projects like Google’s MOE and the games Nexuiz and War­zone 2100, and dur­ing col­lege he did intern­ships with Microsoft, Face­book and super­com­put­er com­pa­ny Cray). “Right now, there aren’t real­ly any good com­mu­ni­ties for inde­pen­dent authors to pub­lish their works, and cer­tain­ly none focused around free culture,” he says. “Fur­ther­more, inde­pen­dent authors have no easy-to-use tools for mak­ing ebooks or nice­ly for­mat­ted online books, so self-distribution and self-publishing is real­ly hard, unless they have tech­ni­cal knowledge.”

“Lee­bre intends to fill this gap: pro­vide a com­mu­ni­ty and tools for inde­pen­dent authors to pub­lish their work and get noticed,” says Bethen­court. “In 2010, I received a Nook as a gift, and was rather dis­mayed to find that there was no huge repos­i­to­ry of fresh, free fic­tion, just like I was used to for music,” he says, ref­er­enc­ing Jamen­do. The repos­i­to­ry for free music from inde­pen­dent artists was a huge inspi­ra­tion to him, and he wants Lee­bre to pro­vide sim­i­lar resources and com­mu­ni­ty to inde­pen­dent authors.

A com­mu­ni­ty of read­ers and writ­ers

Bethen­court has an ambi­tious vision for a com­mu­ni­ty plat­form that will both give authors an easy way to for­mat and share their work, and read­ers a place to find free books and con­nect with their favorite authors. A cor­ner­stone of Lee­bre, like Jamen­do, will be the dri­ving free cul­ture phi­los­o­phy and use of Cre­ative Com­mons for licens­ing. How­ev­er, Bethen­court’s vision goes far beyond web­site sim­ply for Cre­ative Com­mons books to be host­ed and shared. The com­mu­ni­ty, espe­cial­ly, is what he hopes will dif­fer­en­ti­ate Lee­bre from pop­u­lar ebook stores like Google Books and Ama­zon. “The key to (for exam­ple) YouTube’s suc­cess wasn’t that it was sim­ply a host for videos, but that it was a social plat­form built around videos,” he says. “Read­ers like being able to con­nect with authors, and vice-versa.”………..

http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/01/31/leebre-free-creative-commons-ebooks/

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