Our colleagues over at Suvudu.com, Random House’s SF/F portal, have jumped into the eBook ring with the Suvudu Free First Book Library! From their post:
NEW YORK, NY - March 4, 2009 - Random House, Inc. today unveiled the first five titles in its new Suvudu Free First Book Library. Designed to introduce new readers to popular and acclaimed science fiction and fantasy series, the Suvudu Free First Book Library allows readers to access free digital copies of the first book in each series.
The program launches with access to the following novels:
• His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
• Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
• Settling Accounts: Return Engagement by Harry Turtledove
• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Blood Engines by T.A. PrattThe books will be made available through Random House’s science fiction/fantasy portal, Suvudu.com (http://www.suvudu.com), as well as on other content services, including Scribd.com and the Stanza ebook reader application for the iPhone.
Says Christine Cabello, Random House Publishing Group Deputy Director of Marketing: “The Suvudu Free First Book promotion provides us with a new digital vehicle to build an author’s fan base and is an ideal way to bring new readers to these series.”
New titles are scheduled to be added to the Suvudu Free First Book Library on a regular basis. Coming soon are Terry Brooks’s Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold!, Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger, and many more.
This is fantastic news for SF/F fandom in general, and for eBook aficionadoes (like me!) in particular. As of right now, they’re only offering the books as PDFs, but according to the above statement, they will be coming to Scribd and Stanza, which can only mean that at the very least ePub verisons are in the works. Happy reading!
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 02:45pm EST · amended on Wednesday March 04, 2009 02:46pm EST
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 02:59pm EST
Downloads of samples. A chance to test-read stuff never seen/checked before.
Bad:
1. PDF-only, which can't be tucked into my Palm and which forces a hard-to-read page size on 60-year-old eyes.
2. Other books in a given series not necessarily available as eBooks, have to jump through hoops to find the links to ebook vendors.
Ugly:
eBooks available are all DRM-infested.
The Baen Free Library is a much better implementation. DRM-free. Choice of format, including HTML and RTF. And you can pay for the free book if you want, on the spot, which is the way I deal with thanking the author for writing it.
Bottom line: Random House didn't think it through.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 03:27pm EST · amended on Wednesday March 04, 2009 03:29pm EST
If PDF, then they're relying on Adobe's DRM, which is notorious for not rendering on the hardware readers that *can* read them, e.g., the Sony Reader. (That Sony's partner in the ebook biz created a DRM scheme that locks out Sony's hardware is... full of irony.)
Adobe's DRM can also be applied to ePub books, which, well, still locks out the Sony Reader. So even if they're thinking along ePub lines, it still screws over *both* the leading e-ink readers out there. (Go you, Adobe! What did Sony ever do to you?)
Stanza supposedly will be able to deal with Adobe DRM soon, so iPhone users aren't left out. Well, they're left out right now, but in the future they won't be left out.
But everybody else? Pfah.
You can indeed break the Adobe DRM. But at that point you're committing a crime.
I actually would mind the DRM less if it at least locked into the Sony Reader, but it doesn't even do that. (Even though I don't own a Reader, to boot.)
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 04:02pm EST
For my GP2X, I'll just convert them to text, which is always a bit of a pain.
The real only problem with all these give aways for publishers is that I now have so many free ebooks that it'll be a long time before I buy any more.
That said, I recommend Robin Hobb's assassin books, I've already got the physical versions.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 04:51pm EST
The PDFs look to already be formatted for smaller screens, which is pleasant for readers that support PDF. The free samples have no DRM.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 04:56pm EST
The Suvudu free library books are also available for the price of $0.00 in the Kindle store.
Example here.
And yeah. DRM. But on the other hand, reflowable text and available for Kindlers and iPhoners.
The Sony Reader screens seem to have been fitted for by the PDFs.
So that covers the three audiences I have a kinship for. :)
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 05:15pm EST
Thanks for the tip. I just downloaded the Kindle app for iPhone and Blood Engines (T.A. Pratt's Marla Mason books are fab). Glad to have a cool book to road test the Kindle app with.
Cheers,
Rich
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 09:28pm EST
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday March 04, 2009 11:43pm EST
Page numbers and headers tend to hurt on basic pdf to text conversions.
(A minor exploration of the PDF paragraph discovery and page interpretation problem.)
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday March 05, 2009 12:25am EST
Yeah, absolutely they do. Was just pointing out that I looked at it, and found 'em DRM free. The to text thing just quick and easy check.
Also an be fun for Wordles and stuff like that, too.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday March 05, 2009 04:14am EST
Ah, gotcha. Wordles on eBooks - now that's something you can't do (easily) on a dead tree version. :)
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday March 05, 2009 05:41am EST
Not exactly what I want from an official ebook. Random House just got a big, fat, red warning label in my head saying: Do not pay for anything without inspecting the product first!
Looking through the rest of the books, Red Mars seams to be the same poor deal, but the rest are better, though not quite as well done as the free Tor books was...
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday March 05, 2009 08:15am EST
In all fairness, we've had our share of scanned PDFs put up for download, especially at the beginning. Sometimes that's all that's available, and the conversion into a "real" PDF is just too costly, since it would basically entail re-composing the entire book. It sounds ridiculous, since I'm sure any one of the people commenting in this thread (myself included) could do a completely competent conversion to ePub or Mobi from scanned, OCR'ed PDF in a handful of hours, but you're talking about a large publisher that deals in economies of scale. Taking each book on a case-by-case basis—or developing a workflow based on possibly out-of-print backlist titles that are only available as scanned PDFs instead of new, frontlist titles where they do have digital assets—simply isn't the most financially tenable tack.
Obviously I'm speculating here, since I'm not privvy to the goings-on at Random House, but that's been our experience here at Tor and Macmillan. Does it suck? Hell yes. But there's very little that can be done about it in the short run, in many cases.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday March 05, 2009 09:39am EST
Well, I'm not saying they don't have a good excuse, only that their books is way worse than the Watch-the-Sky books from Tor, which is the quality I have come to expect and love.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday March 05, 2009 11:44am EST
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday March 05, 2009 10:12pm EST
So for those, conversion that is needed is basically nil, apart from doing a basic html variety.
e.g.
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook37713.htm?cache
VIEW ALL BY · Friday March 06, 2009 01:35am EST · amended on Friday March 06, 2009 02:01am EST
Here he is.[/s]
Belay that, it's the last book in the series, not the first. Methinks it a mistake.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday March 06, 2009 08:08pm EST
Here it be.