The problem with making money on the Internet is me. I'm an editor at a daily newspaper which, like all daily newspapers, is dying a slow death. The killer is me. I need only to review my activity on the Internet, which primarily involves trying to get stuff -- music, videos, news and the like -- while scrupulously avoiding spending any money.
If I spent a nickel for every intriguing piece of info I read or witty video I watched, I would be a pauper by now. So I must maintain strict fiscal discipline. The same seems to be true of most other Web users.
Even the advertisers are getting in on the free action. An audience of a few thousand, once coveted and worth at least a couple hundred dollars, is now ubiquitous and worth hardly more than a fraction of a penny per click-through.
And so I am here, on the one site capable of drawing an audience big enough to shake enough Internet dimes out of advertiser pockets add up to advertising d0llars, indeed billions of dollars. It is here we can utilize free services and in return we give Google the right to know our birthdate and buying habits and sell an advertiser access to me. Congratulations. Here I am.
Among the multitude of free services Google offers is Google Books, what promises to be the world's largest library and no one can stop them.
And thus we spendthrift bibliophiles have an opportunity to read books that range from the banal to the profound.
Searching through the digital stacks for a diamond in the rough can be every bit as frustrating as looking for a single volume on the sixth floor in the midst of heaps of German tomes during my days at the University of Georgia library.
But I recently came across a very readable volume, an autobiography by a fellow journalist who died in 1900 and accompanied Abraham Lincoln on his inaugural voyage to Washington D.C., within the decade that the journalist himself had first stepped foot on American soil, not knowing a word of English. If there were ever a truer American story than the Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist, then I haven't seen it.
And so it was that I hit on the idea to have a place where book lovers can come and share their stories of free Google Books that strike a modern chord, that are just as readable on a rainy day as Bill Bryson's latest offering that would set us back $24.95 to purchase.
So I will start with a recommendation for Villard's Memoirs and will invite any who care to to post their own suggestions and perhaps we can build a library of refound folios. Here's to you, Google. Take our information, make money and give us free books.
