Great books deserve to be read by all of us, and we ought to be supporting the people who create these books. “Thanks for Ungluing” gives readers, authors, libraries and publishers a new way to build, sustain, and nourish the books we love.

“Thanks for Ungluing” books are Creative Commons licensed and free to download. You don’t need to register or anything. But when you download, the creators can ask for your support. You can pay what you want. You can just scroll down and download the book. But when that book has become your friend, your advisor, your confidante, you’ll probably want to show your support and tell all your friends.

We have some amazing creators participating in this launch.

Biodigital

John Sundman’s 1999 underground hit Acts of the Apostles, a novel about a Silicon Valley messiah, his cult following of brain hackers, and the convergence of biological and digital technologies, was the second book ever to have a Creative Commons license (The first was Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.) This book, together with the other two books in the “Mind Over Matter” series, Cheap Complex Devices and The Pains are now available for free download from Unglue.it.

Sundman’s half-new novel Biodigital is currently available exclusively through Unglue.it’s “Buy-to-Unglue” program and will earn its way to a Creative Commons license based on support from readers.  Substantially based on Acts, Biodigital reimagines this tale in light of new science.

All four books are available on John’s Unglue.it publisher page.

Open Book Publishers

Open Book Publishers of Cambridge, England, is offering 2 titles from their list of academic titles in “Thanks for Ungluing”. The first is The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture, which brings together academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers to address the apparent paradox whereby digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before, while the norms regulating culture’s use – copyright and related rights – have become increasingly restrictive.

OBP’s second title, The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre, is the only study to focus exclusively on the heyday of short story writing – the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – across French, English, Italian, Russian and Japanese writing. Focusing particularly on the stories of Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Giovanni Verga, Anton Chekhov and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Florence Goyet shows that these authors were able to create brilliant and successful short stories using the very simple ‘tools of brevity’ of their period.

Ungluers helped OBP to make Oral Literature in Africa and Feeding the City free to the world.

Moebius Noodles

Education is represented in “Thanks for Ungluing” by Moebius Noodles, a delightful book that helps parents teach math to preschoolers. How do you want your child to feel about math? Confident, curious and deeply connected? Then Moebius Noodles is for you. It offers advanced math activities to fit your child’s personality, interests, and needs.

Jim Bowering, Jake Hartnell

Jim and Jake graciously let us use their sci-fi novels for testing our new program. Bonus: both books are pretty mind-blowing. Jim’s Green Comet imagines … life on a comet. Jake’s 23rd Century Romance extrapolates romance into our plugged-in future.

More to come

We’ll have more “Thanks for Ungluing” books soon. Any ebook published with a Creative Commons license is eligible, so long as we can verify the rights status and the technical quality. email us at rights@gluejar.com if you have questions. We want to have a deep database of Creative Commons books, and for that we need plenty of author and publisher participation.

Please enjoy the books, and help us thank the creators for ungluing their books.