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Old Man’s War, Mistborn and other free e-books from Tor
February 9, 2008 | 12:21 pm
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By David Rothman
“The first week’s free book is Mistborn, by rising fantasy star Brandon Sanderson. Next week’s will be Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, 2006′s winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Over the next several weeks, other books still.” – Tor site, via S.F. Signal.
The TeleRead take: So has Tor finally gotten the Baen religion and decided that E often can promote P? For now, I’m looking forward to Old Man’s War, even if it’s a different kind of book from Scalzi‘s Agent to the Stars, which I loved. Trouble is, I do worry about the business model, long term—-since E for many readers is just as enjoyable, a trend that will only pick up.
Technorati Tags: Tor,Old Man’s War,John Scalzi,Misborn,Brandon Sanderson
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Comments:
Well, Old Man’s War is the first book in the Colonial Union trilogy, and Mistborn is another series (it starts with The Final Empire), so this seems seems the standard idea of giving away the first book in hopes people will buy more in the series. It seems sensible with series. A standalone book might present more problems, especially if there are as yet no further books by that author that might immediately benefit from the free advertising.
Dhamau: OK, I’ll at least buy that argument for books in series, of which SF houses do many. A benign form of addiction, huh? Thanks. David
I’ll point out that Tor started a relationship with Baen about a year ago to distribute eBooks via the Webscription service, but Tor’s corporate parent got the willies over the idea. Rumor Control says lawyers are yacking and that might eventually move forward again. I sure hope so, Tor has lost a lot of money from all the titles I haven’t bought from them in eBook format in the meantime!
What format are these ebooks? – that’s the critical thing for me – I can only read certain formats on my Windows Mobile Phone …
Old Man’s War was very good. Glad to see there’s finally a *legal* e-book version I can read on my Kindle.
It appears that they are PDF, which (for me) makes them worthless as well as free.
Mistborn was only PDF (unfortunate really), however, Old Man’s War and now Spin have been released in PDF, Mobi, and HTML. A little bit for everyone. As for PDF being worthless … it depends on what device you are using to view it. It works fairly well with an iLiad and a 20″ Widescreen in portrait mode.