Do you love reading?
If yes, then you probably have a collection of books at home and many digital books on your Amazon Kindle and other popular online commercial publishing platforms.
But if you love free things and do not have the ethics to question how free things are made available, you have probably landed on a site that has a collection of more than 78m books. Yes, more than 78 million books in electronic format, PDF. Like its name, pdfdrive.com is a go-to site to find those hard to get books and enjoy.
But is it good to read bestselling books from a free website? One would say Google’s business model is about making hard to find resources available. And yes, that is what pdfdrive.com does – makes hard to find books on the internet, easily available to those who need them. Instead of going to amazon and other similar commercial sites that sell books, pdfdrive.com, gives everything to you free of charge without the hassle of registration and the like.
When you are a publisher – self-publisher or otherwise, you know how difficult it is to write a book. It requires time and sacrifice. You must plan the book that is compelling to encourage the reader to open the next page.
Our teachers always told us “read each word in the book, cover to cover.” Of course, they assumed the book is engaging. As we grow old, interests change, and you find skip reading a book.
But not if it is a best seller. It is Amazon, that came up with a business model of making books available to readers globally with Amazon Kindle. And their business model was simple: provide a platform for people to write books and publish for global audiences. In the process, many writers who would otherwise have never made it through the ‘political’ world of being published by a PUBLISHER, started self-publishing online. You write a book, open a publishing account on Amazon Kindle, and alas, you have it available to the global audience.
The problem was, for most of the people, few people bought the book. You kept logging into the amazon publisher section, checking for the number of downloads only to find two or five per month. The income is not worth the effort. Welcome to the reality of self-publishing. In that case, many a publisher opted to make the book available free of charge. The thinking is that if many people read the book, they get to know that the publisher exists… plus that could be the big opening to publishers for the next upcoming book.
You know in publishing the rule is once you start, never stop trying. You write several book proposals and keep knocking on the doors until the big break. Others die before the big break comes. That is ok. It is better than doing nothing.
Back to the pdfdrive.com, what do they do?
If you want to read any book, just go to pdfdrive.com. You will find about 80% of any book you search for! As of this writing, there are over 78 million books in different versions of e-books in multiple readers and still counting. New book titles are added daily. It is one of the best collections of e-books I have found on the Internet in one location other than ebscohost.com and emerald.com, some of the world’s top publishing powerhouses for research and peer-reviewed content.
Pdfdrive.com is so popular because you get the book you need just like that. No registrations required. Nothing. No personal information is required, unless you want to make a wish list, in which case, they request for your email to send the book to you when they find it. The website has well-organized categories and a powerful search engine. All you do is to know the title of any book of interest. And you will surely get it.
Pdfdrive.com makes any book of your interest available, hassle-free.
What is the pdfdrive.com business model?
The pdfdrive.com uploads books it finds online. For some bestsellers, they upload the links to websites on which you can find the book. The pdfdrive.com searches online websites with free e-books and makes such free available on their website. They make the books available to readers easily by organizing them.
They are like a search engine. Only they specialize in e-books of all genres.
Because they rarely ‘host’ the books on their portal, they have not been sued for copyright infringement or intellectual property theft or piracy. They search the internet and other websites with pdf books. They then make the link available on their website. When you find a book of your interest, you download it from the original link but via pdfdrive.com. In effect, if such a book is a copyright infringement, it is an infringement by the website hosting the book NOT pdfdrive.com. That is how the site has managed to stay online and have titles above 78 million, without any legal problems.
Brilliant.
No wonder websites like Amazon kindle and other electronic publishing platforms are losing revenue. Few people have the ethics of buying a book to encourage the publishers to write more. They would rather download a free version! Some authors make their books available for free on their websites from which websites like pdfdrive.com find the links and make them available in one place.
In that case, there is no law being broken or breached. But the portal is slowly changing their business model to host many popular books, since such drives traffic.
However, for some authors, their books are published illegally on websites, which are then made available on the pdfdrive.com. This ultimately leads to a loss of revenue.
The issue of reading books available free of charge on the Internet is contentious. Others say it is unethical. Yet for others, it is the only way for people in poor countries to access premium resources. For example, on Amazon, some books are not sold in some countries making their access difficult.
You know when someone who loves reading is looking for a book title, they behave like addicts of drugs looking for their daily dose. You cannot settle until you find one. And websites like pdfdrive.com which makes popular titles easily available are like gold.
What you cannot get on Amazon with cash, you can find elsewhere free of charge. There are few people would hate such free things.
Do you support pdfdrive.com or not? Would you download a book from there and enjoy it as if it were for free or not? How do you support upcoming publishers to write more books if their titles can be available free of charge? Let’s discuss…
Copyright Mustapha B Mugisa, 2020. All rights reserved.
