FreakAngels, the newest comic from prolific author Warren Ellis, is being released in free installments online through Avatar Press, in what Ellis describes in an interview with Newsarama as "the TV model":

"FreakAngels is free-to-air, but the eventual collected editions will cost money. I can watch pretty much any TV show I want, on the box or on the net, but for something I like, I'd rather have the complete DVD handy."

The science fiction story, illustrated by newcomer Paul Duffield, stars a clan of telepaths living in one of the few parts of London that hasn't been flooded in a near-future catastrophe: "What if the kids from the Midwich Cuckoos had grown up to become disaffected twentysomethings?" is Ellis's pitch. He anticipates the plot unfolding at a novelistic pace, and views the webcomic format as ideal for what he wants to accomplish: "I could let it find its own shape, like a novel, and that if anyone complained that they weren't getting six plot points in a single chapter—well, I'm not charging them for it, am I? I'm figuring that, in a free model, enough people will just come along for the ride..."

Here's some more free books that have recently popped up online:

⇒Fantasy author Steven Brust posted My Own Kind of Freedom, his Firefly fanfic novel for free download in a variety of formats earlier this month, and got 15,000 downloads in the first two days of its existence, probably because io9 picked it up early. Of course, that was before the novel was featured on BoingBoing yesterday morning; who knows how many people have looked at it now...

Knowledge of this book's existence has been floating around the sci-fi world for about a year now; one Firefly fansite explains the novel's origins in a tie-in deal with Pocket Books that never materialized; Brust didn't made a formal proposal but wrote the book anyway, which momentarily drew Pocket's attention until the line was shelved, "cuz if I didn't write it, I wouldn't be able to read it." I haven't seen anything about an official reaction from Joss Whedon, who created the short-lived TV show, but the fans are certainly turning cartwheels online.

⇒The Friday Project is distributing Disraeli Avenue, a novella by Caroline Smailes that spins off from her debut novel, In Search of Adam, in such a way as to be accessible to new readers but provide additional pleasures to those familiar with the characters as "debt, infidelity, incest, love and loss all combine and weave into a potent mosaic of working class life." While the novella is available at no cost, Smailes asks readers to consider donating to One in Four, a British organization that provides aid to victims of sexual abuse. When I looked, readers had already contributed nearly all of the £700 Smailes and the Friday Project originally hoped to raise.