Hugo Award voters (generally, people who've registered to attend the World Science Fiction convention in Los Angeles this August) can score free ebooks of two of the nominated titles. Tor Books has given erights to John Scalzi and Robert Charles Wilson and the authors have released DRM-free RTF files of Wilson's wonderful "Spin" and Scalzi's amazing "Old Man's War," and all you need to do to get your ebooks is email John with your LACon registration info.
I think it's a little silly not to just post these books on a page. The point is to get them into the hands of Hugo voters; generally speaking, anyone who can afford to shlep to a WorldCon can afford to buy a couple books, so the thing that's keeping voters from reading these is more likely to be time-poverty than cash-poverty. Getting over a reader's transom is hard, and your best ally in the task is a friend of the reader you're trying to woo: if you can get someone to read and love your book and then make it easy for her/him to email it to a Hugo voter, you're further along than if you'd posted a physical copy of the book right to the door of the reader. Recommendations from trusted friends are the best sales-tool an author has.
So it follows that the more hands these books find their way into, the higher the likelihood that they'll get forwarded to a Hugo voter. What's more, they've got stiff competition from Charlie Stross's Acclerando, which is available to all comers as a CC-licensed ebook.
A Hugo win for any of these books will sell tons of physical objects — when I worked in a science fiction bookstore, we could hardly keep the Hugo Winners' shelf stocked; those books would practically fly out the door. Even if you believe that giving away the ebooks to all comers might cost you a sale or two (which hasn't been my experience, not by a damned sight; CC licenses sell the hell out of my books), the upside of a possible Hugo win is gigantic and will overcome any potential losses from a widespread ebook release.
