Hey, Evanston, IL! I’ll be at the Evanston Public Library tonight, on the final stop of the Chicago-area part of my Pirate Cinema tour (if you’re coming, you can RSVP here). Tomorrow, I head to NYC for appearances at Comic-Con and WORD Books in Brooklyn (here’s our video remix contest), and thence to Philly, Bethesda, Edmonton, and many other US and Canadian cities (here’s the whole schedule). Be there, or be unprepared for the end-times!

Hey, Naperville, IL! I’ll be speaking and signing at Anderson’s Bookshop tonight at 7PM, in part two of the Chicagoland leg of my Pirate Cinema tour, which wraps up tomorrow night at the Evanston Public Library. Anderson’s is one of the nation’s great indie bookstores, ranking in my books with the likes of Powell’s, and they’re especially committed to kids’ and YA books, doing tons of outreach to schools across the midwest. I hope you’ll come out tonight and show them the love they’ve earned! After Chicago, I go to NYC for Comic-Con and an appearance at WORD in Brooklyn (check out the video remix contest) and then on to Philly, Bethesda, Edmonton and many other cities — check the full schedule for more.

My latest Guardian column is “Giving online customers the chance to pay what they want works,” which describes the thinking behind the Humble Ebook Bundle, a bold name-your-price ebook promo that launches today:

What if the experience of purchasing electronic media was redesigned around making you feel trusted and sincerely appreciated? What if you knew that the lion’s share of the money you spent on electronic media went straight to the creator? What if, in short, you knew your honesty would be rewarded with a fair deal for all parties?

Of all the ideas from the heady days of internet futurism, none is as fraught as “price discrimination,” the practice of charging different rates to different customers for the same product. Price discrimination is a mainstay of the travel industry, where airlines and hotels try all manner of tricks to try and figure out who’s willing to pay more and charge them accordingly.

For example, travellers who won’t endure an overnight Saturday stay are presumed to be travelling on business, charging the ticket to someone else, and therefore less price-sensitive. So itineraries with Saturday stays are often much cheaper than those without.

Region-coding on DVDs is a crack at this: the cost of producing a DVD is very low, so the retail price is pretty much arbitrary. The studios thought they could offer goods at one price in rich countries, and a lower price in poor countries, and use region-codes to prevent the flow of cheap versions from the poor world to the rich world. But DVDs actually cost something to produce on a per-unit basis. What about purely digital goods?

Giving online customers the chance to pay what they want works

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

It took me a little while, but the Pirate Cinema website is finally up, with multiformat downloads and purchase links for the ebooks, print books, and audioboks. Have at it!