Humble Ebook Bundle: Name your price for eight bestselling, ass-kicking sf novels

I'm delighted to announce that the Humble Ebook Bundle is live! Based on the wildly successful Humble Indie Bundles for distributing video games on a name-your-price basis, the Humble Ebook Bundle is a name-your-price collection of awesome entertainment that also helps you support three great charities.

The Humble Ebook Bundle boasts eight science fiction and fantasy books by Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Lauren Beukes, Kelly Link, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mercedes Lackey, and me (!). Name your price for these great books (you'll need to pay more than the average to date for the Scalzi and Gaiman) and then choose how much of your payment to divert to our chosen charities: Child's Play (games for children's hospitals), EFF (defending your digital rights) and the Science Fiction Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund (saving sf writers from medical ruin). The books come in a variety of formats for all ereaders, and there is no DRM!

The previous Bundles have raised over $7,250,000 for charity, and also demonstrated that creators and their audiences can cooperate with one another, eschewing digital rights management and trusting one another to do the right thing.

I'm especially excited that my latest novel, Pirate Cinema, is part of the Bundle. Tor Books were fantastic about giving me permission to add a new release title -- it's only been out for a week! -- to this experimental Bundle. Tor is also donating its share of the proceeds to the SFWA medical fund. There is no better way to reward Tor and these authors for saying no to DRM and restrictive user-agreements, and no better way to support the writers you love, than to buy this Bundle.

I volunteered to curate this Bundle, and I'm incredibly proud of the collection we assembled. You've got two weeks to take advantage of this promotion, and there's more surprises to come!

Humble Ebook Bundle

• [Scott Byrne]

  This seems like a really exciting direction for literature to go in. Hopefully it will ignite the interest of readers! 

• [ZikZak]

  I’m in!  These bundles are a beautiful demonstration of a gift economy.  It’s exciting to see this non-capitalist model spreading to more forms of media.  We can all be richer when we share freely!

  • [Ryan_T_H]

     How is this non-capitalist? Money is being exchanged for goods/services.

    • [ZikZak]

      Exchange is the wrong word.  Goods/services are being offered freely, and people are freely offering money to the providers of those good/services.

      The key difference is that even if I don’t offer any money, I can still get the goods.  It is literally a mutual exchange of gifts, neither contingent on the other.  Simultaneously the craziest economic idea anyone can imagine, and the most obvious common sense way of interacting with other human beings.

      • [IntotheNightSky]

        I really don’t think you can say a service is being provided completely freely here.  You are required to make an initial purchase of no less than $.01 before gaining access to some of the services provided, and around $12 before gaining access to all the services provided.  That’s still a financial barrier to entry.

• [spacedoggy]

  Bought, I had to boot into a VM of linux before buying though ;) I’m sick to death of publishing companies bribing my government to stamp out digital rights in the name of fighting piracy. I’m now spending the money I would have paid on traditional media on stuff like this. Kim Dotcom finding a way to pay artists 90% of their sales is why they went after him. Time to vote with your wallets I think.

  • [Alex Mauer]

    …Why did you have to boot into a Linux VM to buy??

• [sef]

  So, sadly, it turns out that despite all of the above, the Humble Bundle folks say you don’t actually own the copies you buy, and can’t do anything other than read them yourself.

  (I already own several of the books, so thought I could use this to give the redundant ones to other people.  In particular, Old Man’s War and Zoo City.  But, when I was asked, I was told that, no, I am not allowed to do that.  Because of agreements with the authors.)

  • [Jardine]

    You could just do it anyway. Ethically it doesn’t seem any different than giving away an extra copy of a physical book. Or you could donate a penny and pick the gift option. Though with payment fees, that probably costs Humble Bundle, making everyone worse off.

• [dao_tao]

  I got mine.  Nice mixture of sf/fantasy and the price is right.  Always good to send some money towards the EFF and Child’s Play. Happy to donate to the SFWA this time, also.

• [Synthia Weires]

  Yay! Glad that things like the Humble Indie Bundle are starting to translate to other eGoods. 

• [Jamie Tucker]

  It seems so obvious now!

  • [Chrisanthropic]

    It does! (And there goes the Indie Author promo I’ve been working on)

• [zax]

  Bought mine, thank you :)