Once again, a pile of Tor.com’s original stories are becoming available as 99-cent digital chapbooks on various e-book platforms, including the Kindle store, Apple’s iBooks store, Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore, the Google Books store, the Kobo store, and the Sony Reader store.
As a result, almost every original story published on Tor.com, from our mid-2008 launch up until today, is now available through these e-book channels, complete with the original Tor.com art on their “covers.” Going forward, new original Tor.com fiction will appear simultaneously on the site (in inline HTML and audio, both free) and from the major e-book retailers (in versions designed for the current generation of e-readers and reader programs). In other words, you can read it for free here and you can buy a handsome edition for your e-book reader. Or both!
THANK YOU for showing publishing that you can have a myriad of fantasy/SF illustration styles from traditional to purely conceptual, wrap it in fantastic contemporary design, and have a beautiful cover. So many seem to think you have to abandon the art to have sophisticated covers.
Not that I am complaining, but does this mean no more downloadable pdfs? Might be the motivation I needed to buy a reader, but is not the best news I have heard today.
Yay, now I can give you guys money for all the hours of enjoyment I had reading these stories! Let me grab my credit card!
Oh wait, I’m not allowed to buy any of these stories because they are georestricted and I live outside the US.
Guys, I am begging you, give me a DRM-free option. I assure you, my euros convert quite nicely to dollars.
I’d just like to second Hatgirl’s plea. I don’t pretend to know how the numbers would work out, but if you could try a time-limited free-download experiment, I don’t see why you can’t try a time-limited DRM-free ePub-selling experiment. Please, give us a chance to pleasantly surprise you.
Ok, I second the last two comments. I had not realized I cannot even buy them!
Third the last two comments. We liberal heathens love to read too!
Yay, georestriction. Telling customers you won’t sell to them based on where they live, even though last week you were more than happy to take their money.
Not only that, but DRM. Really sucks for people who have readers that don’t support DRM, have computers systems that the DRM platforms don’t support, or for those who just flat out don’t like DRM. I mean, I don’t like being told how or where I can use something I paid money for.
I like the new pricepoint, and have long been a fan of you guys, but please have a DRM free option. Reading books via a webbrowser sucks, and right now, you’re basically telling people that you won’t sell the non webbrowser version to them unless they use Windows or Mac and live in the US.
Geographic restrictions and DRM on individual short stories! And I thought I’d seen everything dumb the publishing industry could come up with to make their product less appealing to buy legally than to pirate for free. I was wrong.
I understand how frustrating this is for those affected by Geographic restrictions. Though I am able to enjoy my ebooks with my Kindle book reader, I hope some brilliant mind can come up with a better idea to allow others the joys of reading.