Update, 9/15: Torie Atkinson has discovered she was in error, and the books are now being taken down from Tor’s servers.
A few months ago, Tor gave away a batch of its books as free downloads to promote its new Tor.com blog website, and by so doing stirred up a minor controversy: a number of the downloaders misunderstood the purpose of the giveaway, and were upset that they could not immediately buy e-books of the sequels to the freebies.
Tor ended the promotion at the end of July, and took down the free downloads—or so they said. But in fact all they actually took down was their freebies’ index page. The links to the e-book files in their promotional mailings have still worked ever since—as do links from blog posts that created their own indices (such as this one).
When I brought this up in the discussion forum on Tor.com related to the Tor freebies, Tor.com representative Torie Atkinson insisted, “They have indeed been taken down from the server. The promotion is over, sorry folks!”
But as of the writing of this post, all the links I checked to books on the server still worked. So, either Torie has asked the operators of the server to take the books down (without acknowledging that they have, in fact, been up all this time) and they have not yet gotten around to it, or else she has taken it on faith that they are gone and not bothered to check the links herself.
Either way, there is no telling for how much longer the links will work—so if you have not yet downloaded the old Tor freebies, best do it now. Note that these files are not on some unauthorized mirror, or peer-to-peer darknet—they are located on Tor’s own server, and have been for all this time. I will update this post when and if I find the links stop working.
Related: Tor: Free e-books returning
I wonder about the ethics of this post. If the publisher doesn’t want them to still go out, why are you circumventing its wishes? After the promo period, I could argue you’re depriving writers of future earned eBook royalties here.
I don’t see anything wrong with pointing out that the links still work. Especially not since he has already helpfully pointed it out to Tor.
They’re on Tor’s own server. (Or at least the server purchased by Tor to host them.) These are the very same links they gave out while the promotion was on—if Tor doesn’t want them to work, all they have to do is take the files down (or otherwise make them inaccessible by shifting them to another directory so the links don’t work anymore).
Chris, that’s the same lame argument online burglars (“crackers”) use after busting into servers that aren’t theirs: “Well, if they had better security, I wouldn’t have gotten in.”
What part of “The promotion is over” is unclear to you?
Mike,
If you got the emails from Tor, you can simply click on those links and the links still work. Tor says they don’t.
This isn’t an ethical discussion, it is a technical one. Tor says the links don’t work. They do.
What don’t *you* understand?
jmurphy
Who busted into a server? I’m just using links they themselves posted (and emailed out to everyone who signed up). They posted those links for all to see, at which point they became public information. You can’t “take back” public information by no longer publishing it, or else nobody could read out-of-print books anymore.
Anybody who saved the Tor page to their hard drive while the index was still up, or who has the emails in their inboxes, or who happened to write a URL down when the page was posted could still follow those links and do the same thing.
“The promotion is over.”
I think you’d feel differently if *your* work was given away for FREE after an agreed-up time period.
Yep. I expect I’d be pretty mad at Tor for not actually removing the content when they said they were going to.
I still think it odd that people complain about conditions with free books.
The saying “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” comes to mind….
I personally find it odd that Torie apparently didn’t even bother to check when two people (myself and the person I was replying to) informed her that the links still worked. Even if she didn’t have the emails still sitting around, she could have googled for links. I guess she assumed that since the table of contents was gone, the books were, too.
And we all know what you make of whom when you assume.
And Yoda, I think they had valid reasons for feeling like they’d been bait-and-switched—but as many times as I’ve repeated the full-length explanation (because someone was WRONG on the Internet), I don’t think another repetition would convince you.
Mike,
The promo may indeed be over, but it is *TOR* that is *still* giving away the books for free.
An analogy: As a promo, a bookstore puts books on a table outside the store, and then advertises free books. The bookstore then stops advertising (“the promo is over”), but leaves the books on the table.
Regardless of ethics, wouldn’t a bookstore take the books back into the store?
(And yes, this analogy falls down six different ways)
jmurphy
And it’s not as if it really matters much in any case. I checked last night out of curiosity, and there are several bundles of not only the books but the books plus artwork too, circulating on BitTorrent (and, I would expect, the other P2P darknets too). They’ll never clear those off the net. The Tor web links are just low-hanging fruit.
Ah well, it looks like Torie has started posting in the various threads in the Tor community; probably won’t be too long ’til she gets to the freebies one.