Previously: Introduction Treecat Trilogy The next three prequel stories move into the “present-day” era of the Honor Harrington setting. In the “Post Diaspora” calendar of the Honorverse setting, they range from 1880 to 1890. The first novel, On Basilisk Station, is set in 1900. There is nothing in particular about these stories that would necessitate reading them before the novels, but nothing in them really spoils the novel story either. A few events brought up in later books are alluded to here, but they’re also covered in those...

Previously: Introduction After writing a number of novels in the Honor Harrington series, David Weber and other writers he invited to participate started writing stories that fit between or before the novels, issued in anthology collections that came out every couple of years. Since I’m rereading the series in chronological order, I’m going to start my reviews by looking at the short stories and novellas that are set before the first novel. In any long series in which some books are written out of chronological order, the question arises: What is...

CNet has an article looking at how to use Jungle-Search.com to find free or inexpensive Kindle e-books. The piece notes that Amazon has almost 17,000 free Kindle titles, though all but 246 of them (as of the article’s writing) were the same public domain titles that can be found on Google Books, Project Gutenberg, or elsewhere. There are also over 220,000 titles for 99 cents or less, and 125,000 between $1 and $5. This looks to be a very interesting search site even aside from e-books. One of the things that annoyed me about Amazon during my Christmas shopping...

I recently had the opportunity to pick up a pair of David Weber books I had not yet read. (Well, “pick up” in a figurative sense, as I read them as free e-books from the Mission of Honor CD on The Fifth Imperium Baen CD repository.) I found them to be quite exciting page turners, with only a few minor drawbacks. The books in question make up the “Multiverse” series: Hell’s Gate and Hell Hath No Fury. As with all Baen titles, they are available in multiple, DRM-free formats. The books are actually co-written between Weber and Linda...

Last week, Helienne Lindvall published a column in The Guardian whose point seemed to be to say, “Look at how all these people such as Cory Doctorow, who advocate giving stuff away for free, charge large fees for speaking appearances! Isn’t that funny?” Mike Masnick at Techdirt wrote that Lindvall completely missed the point of giving things away for free. The point of giving things away for free, Masnick said, is to allow you to make money by charging for other things. Free is a part of a business model. That's all anyone's...

Recently, Valve took a page from stores that release free e-books, such as Baen or Amazon: it released a complete game, and all necessary development materials for the game, entirely free through its Steam digital distribution system. Alien Swarm, from the development team hired to work on Left 4 Dead and Portal 2, does for the Ridley Scott/James Cameron bug-hunt genre what Left 4 Dead did for George Romero and zombies. Players take on the role of one of four space marines investigating a colony overrun with slimy alien creatures. It is a complete, if short...

Barnes & Noble is offering a new free e-book every week for the next few weeks, with a twist: to redeem the e-book download, you have to come into a Barnes & Noble store and show them your Nook or your general-purpose device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, HTC HD2, PC, or Mac) running Barnes & Noble’s eReader. (Or just bring the device and the staff will help you put eReader on it.) You then receive a voucher you can redeem at B&N’s website to download your e-book. On the one hand, this seems to negate one of...

These days digital media are causing so many shockwaves through the world of on-line content that it seems like every time we turn around there’s a story about a paywall going up here, or publishers raising the prices for e-books there. Content providers are seeing their sources of revenue dry up, and the instinctive reaction is to try to grasp whatever revenue source they can as tightly as possible. But there’s another business model that can work, at exactly the opposite end of the spectrum: the “freemium” model. Under freemium, the basic service is made available absolutely free,...

The Bookseller.com reports on a study presented at the Book Marketing Limited conference that suggests price is a key driver for e-book sales in the United States. Kelly Gallagher, Bowkers’s VP for publishing services, noted that free content was also an important factor. A survey of 750 consumers indicated that 44% were reading e-books on a computer, as opposed to 36% using the Kindle. However, they expected the iPad to bring about a shift in these demographics. Another point that was raised is one I’ve suspected to be true all along: Simultaneous print...

Here’s a blog post from Nathan Henrion, a midlist publisher who made a title available on Amazon as a free e-book. He reported seeing the sales rate of the second and third books in its series increase at a rate of 20 to 1. He says that digital sales make up 1/5 of the total sales of this particular series so far, and are growing. Henrion writes: Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist...

Speaking at a media summit event, Condé Nast’s vice president for business development said that rather than blocking off content behind a paywall, the company wants to build “multi-channel relationships” with its readers. It’s good to hear that Condé Nast is more clueful about building an audience in the new media than some other publishing conglomerates—though given that they publish both Wired and Ars Technica, this is hardly a surprise. Speaking of building an audience, journalist Scott Kirsner’s 2009 book Fans, Friends & Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age is available as a free PDF...

Previously we mentioned that  Simon Owens at Bloggasm reported that two BYU academics have looked at the sales of 41 print books for 8 weeks before and 8 weeks after after they were released as free e-books. (You can read their results here.) They found that there is a “moderate correlation” between the release of free e-books and a growth in the sale of the print version in most cases. Interestingly, one of the cases where there was not a correlation—and sales actually went down—was in the case of the free e-books Tor.com offered temporarily to promote the new blog,...