Andrew Lang's classic Blue Fairy Book free -- Kindle edition and audiobook

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/03/09/andrew-langs-classic-blue-fa.html

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Why not from Project Gutenberg?

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Why not from LibriVox?
https://librivox.org/the-blue-fairy-book-by-andrew-lang/

Some credit should go to Project Gutenberg and LibriVox, as they are the ones making this content available initially.that these other sites are distributing, and often profiting from.

Admittedly Google appears to have done a scan and are offering it, but its not free like the above, rather you have to have a Google account.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Blue_Fairy_Book.html?id=5IUSAAAAYAAJ

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Why not Folio Society?

http://www.foliosociety.com/book/BFB/blue-fairy-book

A book like this deserves to be read in a beautiful edition.

The best things in life are $95.

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Why not from an interlibrary loan from a library?

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The other problem with Adobe is the put DRM on this and other public domain books. What if I don’t have a kindle and need an EPUB format? And recommending we go to Amazon on Cory Doctorow’s website? Please correct your article.

I discovered Lang by reading Prince Prigio in an anthology and considered it a great personal triumph when I found a $2 copy of The Blue Fairy Book in a used bookstore.

Yeah, it’s nowhere close to being a first edition and its value is mostly sentimental, but I’m more of a reader than a collector.

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I first discovered Andrew Lang about 6 years ago when a friend had mentioned one of the stories in the Violet Fairy Book. “The Story of Three Wonderful Beggars”. I liked it so much I ended up illustrating a version of it.

I’m not sure if we’re allowed to post a direct link to our own things or not here (don’t want to spam the comment thread), so if you’re interested you can find it on my website which is listed in my user profile.

Anyway, I’ll take this free kindle version of the Blue Fairy Book for sure! Might be better formatted than the versions on Gutenberg.

Thanks! This is the first thing I’ve actually downloaded from Amazon for my Kindle, after several years of Gutenberg, Hugo Reader Packets, free downloads of Cory’s stuff, etc. :slight_smile: It worked quite well - click “buy” and the book just shows up, compared to the not-very-difficult amount of downloading and sometimes Calibre for Gutenberg books.

I did have to search for “Andrew Lang public domain” to avoid wading through N pages of various people’s non-free repackagings (sometimes with illustrations.)

If paper and ink books are more to your liking, the publishing house Dover Books (the kings of public domain reprints) puts out facsimile editions of some of Lang’s best-loved books.

http://search.doverpublications.com/search?keywords=Andrew%20Lang

They also turn up fairly frequently on the secondhand market, and Dover editions are made to last, with sewn signatures - which makes them sturdier than most contemporary commercial hardbacks.

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