From the TOR site: We have collected a few of our favorite stories from 2011 and put them together in a mini free ebook, free for downloading. Of course, you can always read the stories for free right here, whenever you’d like, but for those that like to move about Some of the Best of Tor.com 2011 will be available Feb 14th. Kindle readers can pre-order now, it will be available at other retailers on the 14th. The Table of Contents   Short Stories: “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” by Yoon Ha Lee Among the universe’s civilizations, some conceive of the journey between stars as the sailing of...

Charlie Stross has posted to his blog about the mysterious absence of one of his Merchant Princes series—not the first book or most recent one, but a middle book in the series—as an e-book. The problem, Stross explains, is that the missing book, The Merchant Wars, fell between two periods of Tor e-book activity. The first few volumes were issued during the ill-fated Tor Webscriptions experiment, which Tor’s parent company shut down after just a couple of days. The later volumes were issued after Tor started up again with e-books in 2008. But The Merchant Wars...

Okay, I admit I don’t know that 100% of publishers don’t read their own ebooks – heck, I can’t even swear with certainty that publishers even know how to read — but I am certain Tom Doherty Associates/TOR/Macmillan’s publisher didn’t read the ebook version of Brandon Sanderson’s new release The Way of Kings before releasing it on the unsuspecting public. Let’s set aside the little errors that are in the ebook. Those can be excused because they are little (e.g., a dropped “a” and “the”), they are few (at least in the first third of the book...

On July 28 we published a story about how Douglas Cootey bought a copy of Ender's Game from the iBookstore and how it was full of errors. Apple refused to replace the book, even though a corrected edition had been posted to the store. Now the end of the story. From Douglas' website: On Thursday, August 5th, Apple contacted me via email with instructions on how to redownload the corrected version. A reader let me know they had received that email, too, so I know that others with the corrupted text received their corrected versions. It all took place within...

Douglas Cootey has a cautionary tale on his blog about his inablity to get a refund on an iBook that was replaced by a newer version. Unfortunately, "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card was a different matter. The book was so full of errors I swear it had not been scanned by OCR software as much as it had been scrambled by it. I bookmarked 32 pages of errors, and those are just the ones I was able to find. It seemed every occurrence of "ru" was turned into an "m". There were other issues, too, like runtogetherwords, etc. ... Several weeks...

Until a few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that posting your fiction on the web for free was the best way to assure that publishers would never want it, because publishers want something exclusive that nobody else has seen before. This is why forums like Baen’s Bar, where works can be posted in the “slushpile” for criticism and consideration, require a sign-in, with userID and password. Even though it takes about thirty seconds to set up an account and anyone can do it, it’s a sufficient fig leaf that authors who post there can say their work has not...

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,...

TechCrunch’s M.G. Siegler reports that another “winner” in the Amazon vs. Macmillan feud is Barnes & Noble, who is getting a lot of new purchase traffic for books Amazon is currently unwilling to carry. I would add, from the time I have spent reading various discussion forums about it, that a good many of the people who comment in discussion threads at Scalzi’s Whatever, Charlie Stross’s blog, and Making Light have said they are shifting all their purchases over to Barnes & Noble—and some have said they are going ahead and buying Nooks, too. Furthermore, the SFWA...

Simon Owens, pictured at left, has interviewed Tor authors Jay Lake and Tobias Buckell about what the dispute has done to them. I asked [Jay Lake] if Tor had reached out to its authors at all during this entire ordeal to address any concerns that they may have. Lake said that it hadn’t, and that he had heard from a source that “Macmillan has instructed the entire staff from the top down not to speak on the record.” You can read the rest of the article at Simon's Bloggasm blog....

I conducted an interview with Pablo Defendini, Producer and blogger for Tor.com, via Google Wave. Our conversation ranged from the Tor.com blog itself, to the free e-book giveaway that kicked off the site, to the much-anticipated but still-absent Tor.com e-book store. Defendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions). However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about...

On the blog/community website of science-fiction and fantasy publisher Tor, the interest generated by its free, no-DRM ebook giveaway (which ended last month) sparked some interesting blog posts and conversations about ebooks. Thinking about the new challenges and opportunities afforded by the Internet, John Klima asked, "What Would Hugo Gernsback Do?" (Hugo Gernsback was the founder of Amazing Stories magazine, and thus the father of modern science fiction.) In this entry, Klima looked at various ideas such as microfiction and mosaic literature. The discussion this essay started soon led to another one, on Market Acceptance of ebooks. In this blog post,...

Simon Owens is an online journalist whose Bloggasm blog provides commentary and analysis of online media. In February 2008 TeleRead blogged  about his article about how to make lit ezines more profitable. Previous Bloggasm articles of note include: International Delete Your Myspace Account Day, and  a profile/interview  of how SF writer Jay Lake tackled his illness in his writing . - rjn A few months ago Tobias Buckell noticed a trend in his book sales that most midlist novelists don’t typically see. His book Crystal Rain, which had been released in mass market paperback a year before, experienced...