True Films ($3, PDF)

My friend Kevin Kelly, a co-founding editor of Wired and author of several excellent books, including Out of Control and Asia Grace, is a documentary movie junkie. True Films, his 56-page PDF book, reviews 100 of his favorite documentaries.

Kevin says:

"True Films" contains the best 100 documentaries I've reviewed on True Films as of December, 2004. I winnowed some from the larger list, and came up with an alphabetical collection of 100 documentaries I feel are worth your time. Most people will enjoy the majority included. There's been one private film club launched around this list.

What you get for your $3: a downloadable PDF file of a color version of the book (which was printed in B&W).

Mister Jalopy's Pocket Guide to Life & Death with Modest Automobiles ($1, PDF)

My friend Mister Jalopy of Hooptyrides knows a great deal about older cars, and he knows how to explain the way they work to people like me, who consider the stuff that goes on under a car's hood to be scary and utterly mysterious.

Mister Jalopy has condensed a lifetime of experience working with used cars into a single page PDF document called Mister Jalopy's Pocket Guide to Life & Death with Modest Automobiles. It's truly the best thing I've ever read about cars, and if you are considering buying a used car, then the $1 you'll pay for this downloadable document will pay for itself a thousand-fold. Even if you aren't interested in buying a car, you will undoubtedly enjoy reading this super-dense document, loaded with hard-won wisdom.



Here are just a few of the testimonials that happy readers have sent in:

I just wanted to let you know this was the best $1 I've ever spent.
Even though I swore off project cars 2 years ago reading this has me
teetering on the edge of the wagon. Your words evoke memories of
sights, sounds and smells that are only found under the hood.
-- Dom

Having been a fan of modest automobiles all of my driving life,
and having laid my dirty little mitts on no less than 30 various and sundry
questionable vehicles over the last 15 years, I bought your guide for the
fun of it. A lot of good stuff in there that every old car beginner should
know, and valuable lessons that even "old timers" need driven home. It's
not worth saving the very low cost of a portable tool kit to end up in the
middle of a freeway merge lane trying to repair a bad vacuum leak with no
tools. Ask me how I know.
-- David Culberson

Thank you for Mister Jalopy's Guide to Life and Death with Modest
Automobiles. My payment will move you one step closer to buying your own hippo
place settings.
In exchange, your advice will be tucked away in all of my modest automobiles
as an operating manual. It will help keep that paragon of luxuty, my 1966
Cadillac, on the road and cheerful.
-- Keith of keith.miata.net

bOING bOING Vol 2 ($2, PDF)

Here's a PDF scan of the second issue of bOING bOING, published sixteen years ago, in January, 1990.

This issue includes an article about the over-domestication of Americans by Antero Alli, cartoons by Dennis Worden, Ace Backwords, Rudy Rucker, and me, a review of Dan Clowe's Eightball #1 and #2, articles about brain machines (which I am embarrassed about), a review of Rudy Rucker's artifical life software, CA LAB, a great essay on Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo, and a biography of the US government's own LSD evangelist, Al "Cappy" Hubbard.

bOING bOING Vol 1 ($2, PDF)

This is a scan of the entire first issue of bOING bOING, the print zine that preceded Boing Boing, the blog. I think most BB readers don't know that we started as a zine. Our first issue was printed in 1989, and only 100 copies were made. Now, 16 years later, I doubt more than 10 copies remain on the face of the Earth.

This 36-page issue has an interview with my hero, Robert Anton Wilson, an article about the wonders of public-key crytography, a piece about lucid dreaming, an interview with the 1988 Libertarian candidate for the US Senate, reviews of zines, comics, books, and software, and lots of comics by me and my friends. The writing is clunky and the design is even more clunky, but I think it resonates nicely with the Boing Boing of 2005.

Cowboy Gasoline in the Eye of the Storm ($1.50, PDF)

A while ago one of my writer friends sent me a 40-page-long account of his cross-country driving trip to Florida to take a job. His tale enthralled me. He had to drive through a nasty hurricane to get there, which was interesting, but that's not the best part of the story. The best part is his observations and interactions with interesting characters along the way.

I asked him if he'd like to try selling it on Boing Boing as an ebook, and he agreed. So he made a nice PDF file that includes the story and a couple of color photos. For personal reasons, he wishes to remain anonymous. About all I can say about him is that he has written many fiction and non fiction books and magazine articles.

As an experiment, we are selling the ebook for $1.50. The title is A Transcontinental Odyssey to the Dysfunctional Appendage of North America: Cowboy Gasoline in the Eye of the Storm.