There’s never been a better time to be a cheapskate. Instead of buying CDs, you can stream almost any song ever recorded without paying a penny.
Instead of expensive DVD box sets, you can get entire series online for free. Movies new and old are mere clicks away, with no admission fee bar the odd advert.
Established authors want you to flick the pages of virtual editions of their work, while up-and-coming writers hope that free copies now will make you a lifelong fan later.
Getting free content couldn’t be easier – and it’s all perfectly legal. Who needs dodgy downloads when there’s a lifetime’s worth of legal stuff to consume first?
The best free ebooks
The web is awash with things to read, but even the best pieces of writing online have usually been chopped into pieces and plastered with adverts. If you’d rather lose yourself in a book, there’s no shortage of content to choose from – and you’re not limited to the ancient, out-of-copyright titles on Project Gutenberg either.
One of the best places to start is Matthew McClintock’s site Manybooks.net, which collates ebooks from a wide range of sources and provides download links via the website and its associated RSS feeds. The emphasis is largely on older publications – you won’t find the latest Dan Brown novel here – but the choice is enormous. We particularly like the banned books category.
Few mainstream publishers offer free downloads of entire books, so science fiction and fantasy publisher Baen Books deserves enormous credit for its library of published novels. As Baen’s Eric Flint explained back in 2000, Baen is giving away books to fight piracy: “I’m quite confident that any ‘losses’ I sustain will be more than made up for by the expansion in the size of my audience,” he wrote. Nine years on, Baen’s still adding books to the list of freebies.
Magazine publishers are beginning to embrace free content too. Both www.issuu.com and www.iudu.com attempt to recreate the printed magazine experience in your web browser – we use the former to showcase features on the PC Plus website – and while the available publications tend to be niche titles, a bit of browsing uncovers plenty of little gems.
FREEBIES: Issuu delivers a traditional magazine experience inside your web browser
If you’d rather read publications in PDF format, PDF Geni aims to be the Google of the PDF world. It’s fast and works well, but it’s best suited to technical and business-related documents.
Everyone’s an author
You’ll find lots of PowerPoint presentations and documents about running electrical substations on Scribd, but the so-called ‘YouTube of Print’ also provides access to an enormous catalogue of fiction and non-fiction books.
One problem with sites like this is their accessibility. The fact that anybody can upload means the odd bit of piracy and a lot of pretty bad writing.
If you like the idea of discovering new authors but don’t want to wade through the dross, HarperCollins’ Authonomy might be the solution. It’s a cross between a publishing platform and a social network, with aspiring authors uploading their work and rating others’ efforts. Books are free to read, and if you don’t mind reading works in progress – few of the available books have been edited by professional editors – you might just discover the next blockbuster author.
If you’re too busy to read entire manuscripts, try www.dailylit.com. It takes an interesting approach to online reading: instead of giving you the entire book, it chops it up into daily instalments and delivers it via email or RSS. There are more than 800 free books to choose from – from self-help to science fiction.
Back in the bad old days of digital music, the choice was simple: if you wanted free music, you’d either download MP3s from unsigned musicians or you’d break the law. Now, though, the landscape has been transformed. Free music is everywhere online, the sound quality is usually superb and the artists are people you’ve actually heard of.
Radio stations were quick to move online, and your local radio station almost certainly streams over the web, as do all the BBC ones. Some stations also publish their programmes as podcasts that you can listen to when you’re not online. The BBC has a comprehensive collection at www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts, but there’s an even wider selection in Apple’s iTunes software.
Keep an eye out for podcasts such as Chicago Public Radio’s Sound Opinions, which has played host to artists including Radiohead and Arcade Fire, and NPR’s All Songs Considered, which has featured guest DJs including Thom Yorke, Lily Allen, Conor Oberst, Ray Davies and Randy Newman.
ALL THE SONGS: NPR’s All Songs Considered is an excellent music podcast. Apple’s iTunes has plenty more available for free
The world of online radio is rather fragmented, with aggregators such as Shoutcast featuring so many stations they’re a pain rather than a pleasure to browse, but things should improve early next year for UK users when the BBC and the commercial sector come together in a joint online radio project, aggregating up to 500 UK radio stations in a single portal. The – unnamed as we went to press – project is expected to enter beta testing just before Christmas, and it should be available to the public in early 2010.
Meanwhile, you could always try the radio versions of your favourite magazines: NME, Q and Kerrang have all expanded to become media brands rather than mere print publications, with online radio stations catering specifically for each publication’s demographic.
Hang the DJ
Obviously, the problem with radio is that you’re not in charge of what’s playing, which is why Spotify’s on-demand music streaming is so appealing. The free version has retreated behind an invite-only wall – that is, you can’t sign up until another user invites you – but a quick trawl through Twitter soon uncovers lots of people with invites to spare.
Don’t worry if you can’t find an invitation, though, because Spotify isn’t the only on-demand music service floating around the internet. Grooveshark, Deezer and PureVolume all have wide selections of music, with the latter focusing on emerging artists.
UNKNOWN MUSIC: PureVolume’s emphasis on new artists makes it an excellent way to discover new music
The advertising-supported site We7 Digital has a good mix of mainstream and indie stuff that’s as current as the charts. The ads are more intrusive than the ones on Spotify’s free service, but at least We7 doesn’t have the Conservatives annoying you between tracks.
If you prefer the thrill of discovery to the familiarity of your existing record collection, then Last.fm is the place to go. As a free music service it’s pretty good, but as a way of discovering new music it’s superb: simply enter the names of artists you like and Last.fm suggests others you might not be aware of.
The iLike service operates on a similar principle and is available through www.ilike.com, while Musicovery generates a playlist based on the buttons and sliders you click.
Free online TV
The BBC iPlayer is a wonderful thing but, as a BBC announcer might put it, other video services are available. Channel 4′s 4oD service is very good, with the option to PIN-protect the service so young children don’t watch the channel’s more mature output available.
It’s not just a catch-up service for the last few days’ programmes, either: 4oD is offers entire archives, so you can watch the entire first and second series of things like Green Wing if you fancy it. It’s one of the best ways to kill time watching TV series legally.
Channel Five offers video on-demand too, with free programming in exchange for pre-roll advertising, and both it and ITV make programmes available for 30 days after broadcast.
Sky’s getting in on the act too, but it’s not quite as generous as its terrestrial rivals: much of the Sky Player’s free programming has a little asterisk after the word ‘free’. Sky is rather keen on protecting its subscription revenues, so content you’d normally need a Sky dish to watch is only free to existing Sky subscribers – and only if you’re already paying to get that particular channel.
Even YouTube is getting in on the TV act. In September, Channel 4 became the first broadcaster to agree to deliver full-length TV programming on Google’s video service. The deal means Channel 4 will publish more than 3,000 hours of archive programmes such as BrassEye and Teachers, with Google and Channel 4 splitting the ad money.
You’ll also find Channel 4 content on movie rental site LoveFilm, whose video-on-demand service is peppered with freebies such as Derren Brown Mind Control. If you’re using an ad blocker you’ll need to switch it off, as LoveFilm – reasonably enough – needs to pay the bills in order to deliver free programming.
One of the most interesting video-on-demand services is Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal, News Corp and Disney that streams content from nearly 190 different companies including FOX, ABC, Sony, Warner Bros and Comedy Central.
US ONLY: The popular video-on-demand service Hulu is finally coming to the UK at some point in 2010
That makes it a one-stop shop for almost any popular US programme: The Simpsons, Lost, The Office, 30 Rock… it’s a superb service and there’s just one problem: the UK launch has been delayed until at least 2010, so if you’re outside the US you can’t use it unless you’re willing to bend the rules a little bit.
We’re told that anonymisers such as Hotspot Shield can fool services such as Lulu.com and the Lala.com streaming music service into believing you are a US resident, although using such trickery is definitely against the terms and conditions.
It’s also worth noting that broadcasters are actively trying to block anonymiser services, so what works today might not work tomorrow. The Boxee media centre software is engaged in an ongoing battle with Hulu: the service bans Boxee, Boxee finds a way round it, Hulu blocks that and so on.
There’s a surprisingly large selection of free movies to choose from online, although if you’re looking for the collected works of Pixar you’re out of luck. If you like short movies by new filmmakers, however, you’re spoilt for choice.
The BBC Film Network showcases short films from up-and-coming British filmmakers, while Seattle-based Short Of The Week does the same for global indie films, highlighting the best movies from sprawling sites such as www.dailymotion.com. We’d particularly recommend The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon.
You’ll find award-winning shorts at Coffee Shorts too, and while the selection is fairly limited the quality is generally very high. The same can’t be said for the enormous Revver.com, which hosts the films that Coffee Shorts displays: as with most ‘anyone can upload’ video sites, browsing its pages feels like being trapped inside an episode of You’ve Been Framed.
Vimeo is much more successful, perhaps because users can create their own channels and moderate the content to weed out the really bad stuff. While the site has more than 29,000 movies in its library, finding something interesting doesn’t feel like a chore.
Prefer self-improvement to escapism? Videojug hosts thousands of how-to videos ranging from DIY to dating. If comedy’s your thing then you’ll be happy to hear you can get that online too. YouTube’s always a good source of older performance footage, but if you prefer your comedy to be cutting-edge then Will Ferrell’s Funny Or Die mixes up material from amateur comedians with clips from established stars.
A voting system is designed “to eliminate all the junk that people have to pick through to find videos”. It’s often hilarious but every now and again the content is a bit too American, which also applies to The Onion News Network. The video wing of the satirical newspaper misses as often as it hits, but when it’s good, it’s very good indeed.
Movie magic
Short films are all very well, but what if you prefer entertainment that lasts a bit longer? You can download documentaries of the tinfoil hat variety from www.freedocumentaries.org and hoot at the conspiracies – not all of the films are crazy, though a reasonable proportion are – but if you’d prefer something more interesting, then the Internet Archive has an extraordinary collection at www.archive.org/details/movies.
HISTORICAL INSIGHT: The Internet Archive is a great source of old film footage. It includes newsreels, public info films and movie classics
With an archive including wartime propaganda, videogame footage, newsreels, Night of the Living Dead – the original one, that is – and masses of terrible public information films, it’s a site you can end up spending lots of time on. It’s got an excellent collection of audio recordings too, including the 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles reading War of the Worlds.
Some of cinema’s earliest efforts are now in the public domain, which means they pop up everywhere. Veoh has a decent collection at www.veoh.com/collection/cultclassics that ranges from 1938′s STI warning movie Sex Madness to the iconic – and unconnected – Things To Come, although annoyingly you need to install Veoh’s player software to watch anything more than a preview. Classic Cinema Online is the place to go for movies such as Dracula, House on Haunted Hill and, er, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.
JOIN THE CULT: Overall Veoh is a bit of a mixed bag of films and clips, but its Cult Classics section is excellent
The good news is that things are just going to get better for cheapskates. Hulu’s coming to the UK, YouTube’s expanding into other areas – the recent U2 concert broadcast on the service shows the shape of things to come, with artists offering free footage in exchange for a cut of the ad money – and other free services such as Vevo, a joint venture between Universal Music and YouTube, are preparing to launch.
The increasing amount of free content isn’t because firms are feeling generous. It’s because they want to make money. Free content does two things: it keeps people away from piracy – why bother with file sharing if you can download something from the iPlayer? – and it can be a gateway ‘drug’, something to get you hooked on a service that can then tempt you with premium products.
THE SILVER SCREEN: Classic Cinema Online is heaven for old-movie buffs. It’s stuffed with everything from biopics to spaghetti westerns
Converting just a few people into paying customers can be very lucrative. With those customers paying the bills, the rest of us can continue to enjoy something for nothing.
Post by 
