Free e-copy of Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice

I actually got "Assassin's Apprentice" for free via Kindle (which is still available: http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Apprentice-ebook/dp/B000FBFM...). The book was great, and touched off a whirlwind reading of the whole trilogy.

Great series, but the ending was really depressing even though it was pretty clear what would happen to the main character from book one onward.

The Baan Free Library once gave away books from the Honor Harrington series, a decision which made them at least $100 from me. I can't understand why they don't do it more often. Well, OK, I know the reasons (contractual/rights issues, mostly) but the businessman in me says screw the reasons and get it done.

There is zero marginal cost to distributing the back lists. The core customer for these products grows to like a character/author/series and then is hooked, producing a LTV upwards of a hundred dollars. Lifetime profit is lower because cough publishing sucks, but the sales generated by most of the back catalog are miniscule anyway.

They should just get the lawyers involved and start renegotiating contracts on an industrial scale. Hello, Author #147. You own 19 books with us, each covered by a separate contract. We are offering you a one-time no-negotiation deal: license us perpetual electronic reprint rights on book #1. We will use it to market your other books. We may inform you of particular promotions and details as a courtesy, but might not have the time, make sure to check our blog.

If you agree to this deal, we will establish a baseline for how many sales you had on books #2 through #19 last year. Your royalty on all sales above the baseline triples. Help us help you.

If not, firm handshake and move on to the next author. The publishers will get returns with scale more than anything else.

It's too bad they're PDFs, I'd love to get ePubs without needing to run them through Calibre and then hand-tweaking them.

Or, scratch that. Calibre is sucking on these ones.

Free e-copy of Red Mars at the same link.

I've got the series in dead tree form already, but may as well grab it while it's there.