StoryBundle's Halloween Bundle

News of HumbleBundle's first ebook bundle got around the internet fast.  Hopefully it's success means there will be others.  You may not have heard about StoryBundle.  It's the same idea, you pick the price you want to pay for the 6 books and what percentage of the money goes to the website and to the authors.  You can also choose to donate part of (or, I believe, all of) the money to a charity of their choice (they give 2 options), and if you pay above a certain amount ($9) you can unlock 2 extra books.

Their current bundle (which I bought despite knowing I probably won't get to the books for some time) is Halloween themed, meaning they're all horror novels.  They're DRM free and you get both epub and mobi files.

This bundle has a mix of professionally published and indie authors, which is pretty cool.  So, if you need more books to read, go check out their site.  Click on the books and you'll see a synopsis and excerpt.

I find these book bundles pretty cool.  How about you?

Momentum Books

Momentum Books is a digital only publisher, part of Pan MacMillan Australia.  They're DRM free and make their works available globally.  They've got a small selection of fantasy and science fiction.

I like the DRM free aspect of this publisher, but I think it's also important to point out its global nature.  Many justifications for pirating books center around cost and availability.  Momentum has priced their books between .99 and 9.99, with most at the 2.99 and 4.99 marks.  (Note, that's in Australian Dollars, so you have to factor in your local exchange rate.)  Just as importantly, allowing people from anywhere to buy their books means there's no excuse for not buying if they've published something you're interested in.

I became aware of this publisher through an email where they announced a prequel to a high selling series of theirs, Greig Beck's Alex Hunter series.

Here's the synopsis for the prequel:

Alex Hunter – in the mission that turned him from a normal man into the weapon known as the Arcadian – and the elite team of soldiers known as the Hotzone All-Forces Warfare Commandos must enter a hostile country to rescue a defected Chechen researcher from the center of a country at war.

But the HAWCs are not the only ones looking for the rogue scientist and the mysterious package he carries with him. A brutal and relentless killer and his death squad are on the trail too – and they bring a savagery with them Hunter and his team have never witnessed before in modern warfare.

In this stunning prequel to Beneath the Dark Ice, the HAWC team must race the clock to rescue the scientist, prevent the package from falling into the wrong hands … and save the world from a horror that should never have been woken.

Tor / Forge ebooks to go DRM free

Charles Stross predicted that selling ebooks DRM free would be the fall out of the DOJ lawsuit against the big six, as a way of avoiding giving Amazon a monopoly on the ebook market.

DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)
...
If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

And Tor / Forge is the first to do so.  From their site:

Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free.

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.