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!

Hey, Lansing, MI! I’m headed your way today for a signing at Schuler Books & Music at 6PM, as part of my Pirate Cinema tour, which then moves on to Chicagoland, NYC, Philadelphia, Bethesda, and many other cities in the USA and Canada. I can’t wait to see you — come on out and let your happy mutant flag fly! Here’s the full schedule. Tell your friends!

Yo, Redondo Beach! You’re my last west coast stop on this leg of the Pirate Cinema tour, and I’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy today at 2:30PM (I’ll be back on this coast later to visit Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle). Tomorrow, I’ll be in Lansing, MI, before a multi-day Chicagoland extravaganza. The tour has stops in cities across the US and Canada — see the full schedule for details. Come on out and meet your fellow happy mutants!

Hey, Pasadena! I’m signing and speaking at Vroman’s Bookstore this afternoon at 3PM, as part of the Pirate Cinema tour. I’ll be in Rendondo Beach at Mysterious Galaxy tomorrow, before heading east to Lansing, MI, then Chicago, NYC, Bethesda, Edmonton, and many other cities in the US and Canada. Here’s the full schedule — I’m looking forward to meeting you!

On the NYC leg of my Pirate Cinema tour, I’ll be stopping at Brooklyn’s wonderful indie bookstore WORD. The WORD folks have cooked up a remix video competition for the event, inviting you to make short remix videos, 1-3 minutes long. I’ll be judging the finalists, and the winner will be screened at my reading and signing on Oct 15. Submissions need to be in by Oct 12, so get cracking!

Hey, Berkeley! I’ll be at Books Inc tonight on 4th Street at 7PM, as part of the Pirate Cinema tour. Tomorrow, I’ll be in Pasadena and then Redondo Beach, then Lansing, MI, Chicagoland, and many (many!) other US and Canadian cities. Here’s the whole schedule — come on out and say hi!

Further to yesterday’s post about the availablity of a DRM-free, EULA-free MP3 download for the audiobook of Little Brother, I’m pleased to announce that I’m also selling the audiobook for my new novel Pirate Cinema. As with the Little Brother audio, this is a professionally voiced, unabridged audiobook from Random House Audio. This one is read by the rather fabulous Bruce Mann.

The reason I’m selling this direct from my site is that the largest retail channels for audiobooks — iTunes and Audible — refuse to carry audiobooks without DRM and onerous license-agreements. I don’t want to lock you into anyone’s platform, and I don’t want to take away any of the rights you get under copyright law. So I’ve taken matters into my own hands, offering the book directly, in a fair, straightforward, simple way. I’m immensely grateful to Random House for backing me in my fight against DRM, and for sacrificing the revenue they’d get from iTunes/Audible in order to leave me with my principles intact.

Pirate Cinema Audiobook

Hey, San Francisco! I’m at Borderlands Books in the Mission tonight at 7PM, for the Pirate Cinema tour! Tomorrow night it’s Berkeley, then south to LA, then all the way to Lansing, MI, and then a host of other cities across Canada and the USA. Check the full schedule — I hope I get to see you!