JUDE IN LONDON: THE 'TRUST' EDITION

From the publisher

Hello. I'm Ben Yarde-Buller, publisher at Old Street.

Julian Gough and I have decided to offer, for free and with the merest soupçon of a stringlet attached, the full pdf of Julian's new novel Jude in London, recently shortlisted for the Guardian's 'Not the Booker Prize'.

Here's the deal.

1) You download the pdf of Jude in London here, for free.
2) You read none, some, most or all of the book.
3) If you enjoy it, you return to this site – here – and make a payment into our Paypal account. We will split this with Julian. The minimum you can give is £0.10. To give more, change the 'quantity' field. If you enter '100' in the quantity field, Julian and Old Street will receive £10; if you enter '100,000' we will receive £10,000; if you try to enter '0.1', you will receive an error message and we will send one of our larger interns round to your house.
4) Finally, we would love it if you sent us, along with your cash, a few words expressing your reactions to the book. You can do this using the 'Add special instructions to the merchant' link on the Paypal site.

Why, you may ask, are we doing this? Jude in London took Julian Gough years to write – indeed, the writing of it led directly to his eviction and subsequent homeless one-man volkswanderung about Europe. And we, the publishers, have spent a fair bit of our own time and money on its editing, producing, marketing, publicising and so on. Is it not, therefore, a terrible risk to make this fruit of much sweat and many tears available for free – willfully to cast it adrift on the pirate-infested seas of the internet, defenceless as a millionaire's pleasure yacht off the Horn of Africa?

Well, it may indeed prove to be a costly mistake. But here's our thinking.

Mainly, we're doing it because we have confidence, not just in the book (though, of course, we do think the book is terrific), but also in the decency and fair-mindedness of the people who will download and read it. That is, we think that, by and large, those who have enjoyed Jude in London will want to ensure that the author is paid for writing it. (And, in case you were wondering, that was the sound of the reader – you – being morally blackmailed.)

Another reason: we're aware of a bigger threat than piracy – oblivion. It is not easy, in this cash- and time-poor age, with free forms of entertainment abounding, to persuade people to spend money on an unknown book. Yes, a great book affords many hours of enjoyment and enrichment; indeed, adorns the shelves and the mind for a lifetime. Thus valued (i.e. using the crude calculus of 'hours of enjoyment and enrichment afforded'), a great book ought to cost far more than, say, a ticket to the cinema or the opera. But it doesn't, and among the reasons for this is the fact that a book – particularly a new, unproven book – comes with a grave risk: that, far from the hoped-for intellectual, moral, emotional and spiritual nourishment, it will bring nothing but asphyxiating boredom and hair-yanking irritation – with the pain only prolonged by that dreadful duty to finish felt by so many readers.  And, of course, the worse a book is, the longer it takes to get through. What if you were unlucky enough to pick up an infinitely bad book? It would take all eternity to read it. Films and operas are different: the potential rewards may be less, but so are the risks. They're over in an hour or two, and even if they've bored or annoyed the pants off you, at least they've got you out of the house.

So: we're hoping you'll be more likely to spend some of your precious time reading Jude in London if you don't simultaneously have to spend some of your precious cash.

That can come later, after you've enjoyed the book, if you've enjoyed the book, here.

Download Jude in London for free here
Pay for Jude in London here