tl:dr - You can download all my guides free of charge, everybody! Just, you know, consider buying them if you like them, or alternatively help spread the word if you don’t have money to spare. Download links at the bottom.

People say that information should be free or wants to be free. I don’t know about that. Personification is a literary device and not a logical one after all, though I certainly understand the sentiment.

What I do know, or rather what I think, is that all information, be it art, education, raw data or whatever has the potential to inform the reader and contribute to a larger social conversation (or in my case, the work mis-informs the reader and destroys future conversations). I don’t like the idea of denying someone access to any sort of information or to a social conversation because of how much money they may or may not have. It doesn’t sit well with me.

On top of this, the people who pirate the most media tend to be the people who buy the most—in these cases, piracy only means a lost sale if they didn’t like what they downloaded. It seems completely fair to me that people not pay for something they didn’t like. In cases where people pirate media because they can’t afford it, piracy isn’t resulting in a lost sale, they couldn’t afford to buy it in the first place, right?

If I were a grocer, it would kill me to see people who needed food but didn’t have any money. As a grocer, I wouldn’t be able to give them much if any, because groceries are physical goods and you generally have to sell what you have in order to make or obtain more (and to pay your own bills in the process). To give it all away would mean you’re out of business. Lucky for me I sell digital goods, so I can give it all away and still have exactly as much as I started with. So I am.

Every BABU Guide will be made available here, on this site, for free. If you download something here and find you don’t like it, no worries. Thanks for giving us a look.

If you did like it however, consider this:

At the time of writing this, I have a full time job. I’m not starving, so I’m not going to guilt anybody. Someday, however, I’d like to leave this job, or at least step down to part time. I’d like to write more, more guides and other things like novels, comics, etc. That requires more time and more resources. So, if you like these guides and feel they’re worth money, or if you’d like to see what else I can do and want to help, please buy some of these.

If you don’t have money to spare, hey, I’ve been there. It’s cool. You can still help support these works, if you want to, by spreading the word. Tell your friends, blog it, tweet it, add us on whatever social network you prefer, you know the drill.

Oh, and one more thing before I finally let you scroll past to the links. If anybody ever posts any of my works to a torrent site or something, I’d appreciate a link back to this page in the description, and perhaps drop me an email so I can see what the response is. No DMCA bullshit, no takedown notices (I promise), just curiosity.

Links

All these files are hosted from a Google Drive account at the moment. If that ends up not working well for any of you, email me at egghead@babuguides.com and I’ll work something else out.

The first guide published was a triple-length:

How to Hide Your Boners

Download it Free or Buy a copy

You can get the first four singles in one volume:

The Collected BABU Guides Volume One

Download it Free or Buy a copy

Or individually:

How to Turn into a Cat

Download it Free or Buy a copy

How to Avoid Ebook Scams

Download it Free or Buy a copy

How to Pretend to Have Climbed Everest

Download it Free or Buy a copy

How to Whitewash Your National Spy Agency

Download it Free or Buy a copy

Enjoy!

–Charlemagne

PS - I should also point out that of course there’s a difference between someone posting something on a torrent site for free to allow other people to experience it, and posting someone else’s work for sale for your own profit. Perhaps for free we can call it piracy (as that’s the established term now) and for profit we can call it bootlegging? A pirated copy probably isn’t a lost sale, and a bootlegged copy probably is. If such behavior ever comes to my attention I will do whatever I can to stop it, including takedown notices and all that. Okay? Download it, email it to friends, upload it to torrent sites, that’s all okay by me. Selling it somewhere else? That’s completely unacceptable, and it impedes my ability (and my drive) to produce future works.

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