Novel offered for free online (AP)

NEW YORK - Charles Bock's "Beautiful Children, a best-selling debut novel about characters adrift in Las Vegas, is the latest book to be offered for free online.

Starting Wednesday, Bock's novel can be downloaded from the Web site http://www.beautifulchildren.net/read. The free electronic edition will also be available from such leading retailers as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

"I want people to read the book," Bock said in a statement issued Tuesday by the Random House Publishing Group. "If that means giving it away for free online, great."

"The book really struck a chord with readers as bookstore sales have demonstrated," Avideh Bashirrad, deputy director of marketing for Random House, said in a statement. "We believe it has even more potential readers out there, and the best way to reach them is online, with this unrestricted access."

Publishers have worried about Internet piracy and whether online text could hurt traditional sales. But lately the trend has been to make more books available on the Internet and hope that interest in all formats will be increased.

HarperCollins recently announced that books by Paulo Coelho, Neil Gaiman and a handful of others would be posted online (although not for printing or downloading). In mid-February, financial advice writer Suze Orman said on Oprah Winfrey's television show that "Women & Money," published in 2007, could be downloaded from Winfrey's Web site over a period of 33 hours. More than 1 million copies of the book were downloaded and the paper edition jumped into the top 10 on Amazon.com.

"We're willing to sacrifice a few sales in the expectation that a wider sampling opportunity will build consumer awareness and more business for our booksellers and our authors," said Stuart Applebaum, spokesman for Random House, Inc., which publishes both Orman and Bock.

"Historically, book publishers have relied on sampling and giveaways. Previously, we've had printouts of first chapters or sections of a book available. This takes the sample to a larger and more technologically sophisticated form."