A Pre-Hiatus Gift to You: A Free E-Book!

Before I head off for my six-week hiatus, I thought I’d leave you a little reading material. A decade ago, I wrote a series of entries which I called “That Was The Millennium That Was,” chronicling what I thought were some of the best, worst and weirdest things of the last millennium. It was a pretty good series — good enough that I was able to repurpose some of the essays for resale and featured a couple others in Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. But the whole run of the series has been off the site proper for over seven years, which means that many of you haven’t seen most of these pieces.

So, as a parting gift, here’s the whole series as a free e-book, DRM-free.

Click here for EPUB format

Click here for MOBI format

Clicking on the link should download the thing to your computer, and then you can transfer it to the e-book reader of your choice. Between EPUB and MOBI, I think I’ve just about covered every current e-book reader out there, and if you have an e-book reader that doesn’t read either of those formats, well, I guess I don’t know what to say to you, except, possibly, here’s the free MobiPocket reader for your computer.

Two notes:

1. This is an amateur e-book, created by me cutting and pasting the entries into an RTF file and then running it through a format converter. So a) it is very lightly copy-edited and you may run into a few flubs here and there, b) it’s not a brilliant work of e-book formatting. Hey, it’s free, and I think I caught 95% of the misspellings. You can handle the rest. No, I don’t want you to send me an e-mail telling me when you find a flub. I’ll be on hiatus, remember?

(Update, 5:20pm: Whatever reader Béranger has been kind enough to add a table of contents to the epub version; I’ve updated the file with the new version. Thanks, Béranger!)

2. Feel free to share the e-book on a non-commercial basis (i.e., one-on-one with friends, etc), and to mention it on your blog, in tweets, and so on — and if you do, thanks very much. But do me a favor and link to this post when you tell people about it, because that way I can have a reasonable gauge of how many copies have been downloaded, which is information I would actually find useful for thinking about free e-books in the future. Please don’t upload it to repository sites like Scribd, or to torrents or other such things, again, so I can have a reasonably clear idea how many people are checking the thing out. Thanks.

One final note — this e-book is offered for free, as a gift, with no expectation of payment. I’m good for now, thanks. That said, if after reading it you feel moved toward compensation one way or another, I would be pleased if you took a dollar or two (or three, or five, or ten) and sent it to a literacy charity of your choice. Two that I like are Reading is Fundamental and First Book. Literacy is a good investment for everyone, and helping kids and adults learn to read is one of the best ways to “pay it forward.” So give it some thought, if you enjoy what you read. Thanks.