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‘Disunited States of America’ is latest free e-book from TOR
April 11, 2008 | 7:13 am
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By David Rothman
“The Disunited States of America is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is a part of the Crosstime Traffic series, and takes place in an alternate world where the U.S. was never able to agree on a constitution and has long since evolved with each state as a separate country. The states trade with each other, engage in diplomacy, and even go to war with each other. The story concerns two outsiders caught up in a war between Ohio and Virginia: a young girl from California visiting relatives with her grandmother, and a boy from our world’s Crosstime Traffic trading firm.” – Wikipedia.
Details: Henry Turtledove‘s novel is the latest nonDRMed freebie from TOR and is available in PDF, HTML and Mobipocket. Oh, that title! Forget about Turtledover’s Disunited scenario or the blue and gray uniforms of the Civil War; today we have blue and red states.
Remember, respect TOR’s intentions—this is still a copyrighted book and, as far as I know, is only temporarily available for free. Sign up for freebies at TOR’s home page. The idea is to use e-freebies to encourage interest in p-editions and other books by the same writers and other TOR authors. Here’s rooting for TOR to succeed! Same for Pan Macmillan’s experiment with a DRMless collection of essays by Clive James, even if some think the price is still too high at £11.99.
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Comments:
I do wish Tor was following up with ebook versions of the sequels to the books they’re giving away with this promotion. For example, I quite liked Walton’s _Farthing_, but _Ha’penny_ isn’t released as an ebook.
A ridiculous oversight, IMHO.
I don’t think it’s an oversight, but marketing. Baen’s been doing this for years: putting the first book of a series (or the first “major” book by an author) in their Free Library, with later books available for sale in both print and DRM-free electronic format. It’s a nice gesture to fans new and old who want to discover authors for free, and it brings them more customers. Sometimes they’ll add more books, but their strategy seems to be to put initial or older works up for free, and let readers who like them seek out and pay for more recent books from the same author or series.
As far as I know, Tor isn’t yet selling their own ebooks like this, but I suspect they will eventually; perhaps when their new website comes out.
I’m aware of Baen’s strategy, since I’ve read nearly half of the free library at this point.
It just strikes me as a bit stupid to release a free lead-in book to a series without having ebooks of the remainder of the series available *for sale*–or having the *next* book for sale as an ebook at least. That’s how I got hooked into (and purchased as e-books) Drake/Flint’s Belisarius series, despite my general dislike for modern military sci-fi.
Note that there’s no ebook version of _Ha’penny_ for sale anywhere.