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Tor Books Is Giving Away E-Books
stoolpigeon writes "Tor Books is launching a new site and running a campaign in which they are giving away e-books (free as in beer) until the site goes live. To get in on the deal, fill out the form at their site, and each week you will receive a newsletter containing links to download a new book. The first two books are Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson followed by Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Scalzi's site says: 'My understanding is that they don't have DRM on them. Or at least, mine isn't supposed to have, and I don't think they're planning mine to be special in that regard.'"
Will Tor be releasing as e-books those works where science fiction and fantasy reaches the best of world literature (for example, Tor holds the U.S. rights to Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun), or will they only be releasing their ephemeral "airport novels" that are only released in paperback and left to go quickly out of print? It's a pity that so far the only science fiction published to embrace e-books has been Baen, whose publications generally fall into the mindless entertainment sphere of science fiction.
Also see Baen's free library at http://www.baen.com/library/
Baen will also sometimes include a CD containing many E-books with certain hardbacks. It's made them some money from me, since I was introduced to certain series (1632, March Upcountry, Honor Harrington) via this.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Am I the only one that wondered why Tor (the anonymity network) was giving away free ebooks?
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I'm encouraged to see e-books taking a stronger position in the market, but I'm saddened that so much attention is being paid to products that are tied to DRM. When I buy a book, I tend to look at it as a long term investment in my personal library. That is, I'm buying a copy to own forever. This early in the industry, I have no confidence that any DRM scheme implemented now will last any significant length of time. Will I still be able to read the book 20 or (hopefully) 40 years from now?
It's a bit sad how so much effort is being made to obfuscate what is essentially the simplest of all computer formats: a text file. As others have repeatedly pointed out, there are some killer markets for these things in education. Saying goodbye to all those textbooks would be an unbelievable win for schools AND students.
I think three things need to happen before these things take off (and they eventually will):
1) The price needs to come down. A lot. $400 is just waaaay to much to make these things ubiquitous. Think about attractive one of these might be at $50. It would be hard to resist.
2) Lose the DRM / stop with the proprietary formats. Books, even more so than software, yearn to be free.
3) Major publishers and popular authors need to get on board. Unless the authors who people really want to read are available, the whole exercise is sort of pointless.
I can certainly afford a current-generation e-book reader, but until I can actually read the stuff I want to read, it's somewhat pointless. Here's hoping...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
For some reason, they don't use that nickname that you're using for Convert LIT the official site.... I really can't imagine why.
I could never figure out how to use clit either. I think the trick is to just fumble around with it until something happens. A buddy of mine told me I should try it on my laptop. Never worked for me though, not enough RAM.