Before I had my Kindle, I was buying around 30 paperbacks each year - mainly crime and Napoleonic stories. Not as many as some, I know, but more than many. My Kindle cost less than a single year's reading. Thanks to the Kindle Select programme, I have now downloaded over 300 FREE books on promotions by contemporary authors. I read at around 30000 words a day, around a hundred conventional pages so each of these books is going to take about three or four days to finish. So I have three years reading ahead of me and each day, more of my fellow authors insist on putting their work out there for free. Why? My wife bought many more books and read far more than I did, but now has a Kindle and has a hundred FREE books to read. Both my daughter and daughter-in-law have done the same. Between the ...four of us, in the age of paper, we would have bought around 200 to 300 books in a year. Since authors have been so willing to give their hard work away for zilch, they, like me, have not bought a single one! As I have not taken part in the Amazon Select Scheme, can someone please explain what the advantage is. I accept that books are listed in the online libraries and royalties are paid if the are borrowed, but I would like to know if anyone other than Amazon has benefitted from giving their work away for free? As far as I can see, giving your books away for free spells the death of the writing profession. Who is going to buy while the freebies are out there?