Okay, this prob­a­bly won’t be our high­est rat­ed post ever. We’ll con­cede that. There’s noth­ing chic
and hip about C‑SPAN. But there’s some good sub­stance here, and sub­stance is what we’re about first and fore­most. So give us the ben­e­fit of the doubt for a moment.

C‑SPAN’s Book-TV lets you stream videos of talks, long and sub­stan­tive ones, giv­en by most­ly seri­ous authors. You can catch Pres­i­dent Jim­my Carter talk­ing about his new con­tro­ver­sial book, Pales­tine Peace Not Apartheid (plus Alan Der­show­itz’s response); Niall Fer­gu­son, the Har­vard his­to­ri­an, speak­ing on his recent work, The War of the World: Twen­ti­eth-Cen­tu­ry Con­flict and the Descent of the West; Howard Zinn, anoth­er his­to­ri­an, dis­cussing his col­lec­tion of essays, A Pow­er Gov­ern­ments Can­not Sup­press; and Adri­an Goldswor­thy giv­ing a talk on his new biog­ra­phy, Cae­sar: Life of a Colos­sus. For a com­plete list of book talks, click here.

In many ways, C‑SPAN’s offer­ing is no dif­fer­ent in qual­i­ty or sub­stance from the video ser­vices offered by FORA.TV and Prince­ton’s Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel — two oth­er high-qual­i­ty ser­vices that we like and have pre­viewed here before. If you can set aside your gen­er­al impres­sion of C‑SPAN — your mem­o­ries of the unedit­ed, end­less talks from the Sen­ate floor that lead to nowhere — you’ll find enlight­ened video here that’s well worth your lim­it­ed time.

It was prob­a­bly only a mat­ter of time before this hap­pened. Accord­ing to The New York Times, Touch­stone, an imprint of Simon & Schus­ter, has agreed to pub­lish a work by whichev­er new writer takes first prize in a con­test spon­sored by the social-net­work­ing site, Gather.com. A la Amer­i­can Idol, every­day peo­ple and pan­el of experts will read and vote on the first chap­ter of books sub­mit­ted by every­day peo­ple.  And although the win­ner will need to sign the “stan­dard Simon & Schus­ter con­tract,” he/she will get their work fast tracked to pub­li­ca­tion and for­go the  has­sle of shop­ping a book. Also, there’s a $5,000 cash prize and the promise of pro­mo­tion at local Bor­ders’ book stores.

The under­ly­ing log­ic behind the con­test, called “First Chap­ters,” comes down to this: It’s ulti­mate­ly peo­ple who buy books, so why not let a good sam­ple demo­graph­ic (Gather.com’s 175,000 old­er and more mature users) pre­view the sub­mis­sions, decide what they like, and save the edi­tor the effort of guess­ing what will fly. That makes a cer­tain amount of sense if you’re a pub­lish­er, work­ing in a slug­gish indus­try with nar­row mar­gins, who is always look­ing to max­i­mize the odds of putting out win­ners. How­ev­er, whether it will fur­ther the pub­lish­er’s mis­sion of bring­ing qual­i­ty books to our cul­ture is an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent ques­tion, and the jury remains out on this one. You can get more infor­ma­tion about the con­test by click­ing here.

Here is a quick tid­bit for the read­er who does­n’t like buy­ing books sight unseen. Each week, The New York Times posts on its web site the full text of the first chap­ter of books reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, or which oth­er­wise appear on the NYT best­seller lists. You can find some of the recent­ly high­light­ed texts on The Times’ First Chap­ters page. Or for a com­plete list, you can turn to this less designed page and work through a list of books arranged in clear, alpha­bet­i­cal order.

More Free Texts: With­in our Edu­ca­tion­al Web Resources com­pi­la­tion, we have includ­ed many oth­er sites that pro­vide access to free online texts. Sim­ply look under the first sec­tion called “Online Texts & Text Search,” and you will be on your way.