Remember the Humble Indie Bundle, the Humble Indie Bundle 2, and various successors? They applied the pay-what-you-want model to selling sets of popular independently-developed computer games, and have reportedly made a lot of money for the developers, as well as for the charities that they also support. Now a new site, StoryBundle.com, has sprung up that promises to do for e-books what the Humble Bundle does for games: select a few quality independent e-books and allow people to set their own price for the DRM-free bundle. It still seems to be in the planning stages—the site is taking the...

I mentioned last week that the UK government had eliminated its funding for literacy charity Booktrust with the new budget that takes effect in April. In response to public outrage at this decision, The Bookseller reports that the government and Booktrust have released a joint statement saying that the government will “continue to fund Booktrust book-gifting programmes in the future.” However, critics are still skeptical. Labour leader Ed Miliband calls it only a “partial U-turn” (isn’t that kind of like being “a little bit pregnant”? A “partial U-turn” is just a turn!) and points out that the announcement is...

The Bookseller is reporting that Lee Harris, editor of Angry Robot, and steampunk author Scott Harrison have set up H&H Books as a non-profit publishers. Their first title will be Voices From the Past and will be an anthology of flash fiction with over 20 authors including Jasper Fforde. The title will sell for 59p/$0.99 and all proceeds will go to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. The book will be published in April, 2011. Scott Harrison said: "Flash fiction is ideally suited to the electronic format, and with over 20 stories for less than the cost of a can...

An email from reader David Cassel: A team of seven people just began delivering Kindles filled with ebooks to students in a village in Ghana! It's the pilot program for a new charity hoping to improve third world education using ebooks, using digital readers in remote villages to "put a library of books within reach of every family on the planet." The organizers are maintaining an inspiring blog, saying that each delivery "was as if we were handing someone raw power," and noting that it seems to be having a positive impact on the rest of the community. And Amazon even...

In January, we covered a fundraising drive that DriveThruRPG put on to assist Doctors Without Borders’s relief efforts in Haiti, selling a $1480 bundle of RPG e-books for the budget-friendly price of $20. It ended up earning over $160,000—not exactly pocket change—and showed that gamers are willing to step up to help out in time of crisis (or, at least, are willing to take advantage of a great deal on gaming e-books even if they would otherwise have been opposed to donating). Now DriveThruRPG has another charity bundle available, to help Doctors Without Borders’s relief efforts in the...

Taking advantage of the zero-marginal-cost nature of electronic media distribution, a group of independent computer game developers has teamed up to offer the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a bundle of five games (including the award-winning World of Goo) for Windows, Macintosh, or Linux as a set-your-own-price download. Purchasers can choose how much of their purchase contribution they want to go to the games’ developers and how much to go to the non-profits Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The default is to split it fifty-fifty, but if purchasers want it all to go to the developers, or...

Only a couple of days remain to donate $20 to help Doctors Without Borders’s efforts in earthquake-torn Haiti if you want to receive the $1480 bundle of digital RPG content from DriveThruRPG that we covered here and here. The tally on the site currently stands at $162,200 donated by gamers to help out in Haiti. This digital giveaway exemplifies one of the greatest benefits of the zero marginal cost of distribution of digital media. The low overhead of providing it means there is practically no cost to give it away, so it can serve as a very...

I’m at Springfield, MO gaming con VisionCon helping staff the booth for the other Springfield con, SpringfieldGAME. This seems like an appropriate time and place to reflect further upon the DriveThruRPG Doctors Without Borders charity drive that I covered a few days ago. According to the site, gamers have donated over $117,000 so far. DriveThruRPG will accept donations until further notice, but the bundle will only be given out through the end of January (though the downloads will remain accessible afterward to those who have already purchased it). For those curious about where their donations are going, BoingBoing has...