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Usually the non-downloadable stories were reprints, like the Neil Gaiman thing and the Kage Baker one and the Ellen Kushner chapbook which were posted in recent months.
It used to be that the downloadable ones were the Tor.com originals which they'd presumably commissioned especially for the site.
I myself don't particularly care if they want to additionally monetize what they've got. I'm perfectly capable of making my own ePubs from the online versions if I want a portable copy.
But I do think that yanking the openly available downloads just as the e-reader market is really starting to take off now that the devices are at a much more affordable price and gaining media attention is disadvantageous to Tor and the participating authors from a promotional perspective.
The first thing people do when they get a reader is look for stuff to put on it. Preferably free stuff, which then hopefully leads people to try the paid stuff.
I myself went and bought several of Charles Stross' (whom I'd never read before even though they've got plenty in the library) books purely on the strength of his Tor.com stories, which I'd downloaded and read on public transit using my Kindle; something I might not have done if I'd had to find time to sit down at the computer to go through them.
And I've also gone and bought a number of sequel or same author/imprint books after having been offered another to read free during the standard time-limited publisher promotions in the major stores.
As I mentioned upthread, I spent some time talking up various free downloadable e-book sources such as the Baen Free Library and MobileRead and the now defunct Tor.com short stories to a Kobo salesguy as a possible selling point to add to his customer pitch.
How many people here on MR and elsewhere, tend to first mention places with at least a small free section (Feedbooks, All Romance eBooks, those Try Harlequin/Mills & Boon sites, Cory Doctorow) to the newbies asking where they can get stuff to put on their reader?
I know that I certainly talk up publishers like Night Shade Books (well, not so much since the unfortunate royalty non-payment incident) and authors like Peter Watts who've made a few of their books available for free download.
And I'm much more likely to recommend something of theirs when suitable requests pop up during discussion, because I definitely prefer to point potentially interested people to something they're officially encouraged to sample in full at no cost beyond their time.
It's as simple as that. Openly offering easy-to-get free stuff (even if you rotate it) is often good publicity for your paid stuff.
Sure, you might not make every last penny off of it that you could if you charged, but it gives the impression of generosity and creates goodwill, which people tend to meet with slightly more open wallets then perhaps they normally would.
I've gone and bought e-books that I could likely have read from the library, or perhaps have found more cheaply second-hand, from authors whose works I've managed to sample from free giveaways and decided that I wanted to repay their open-handedness by putting some money into it, even if it turned out I didn't really enjoy their writing all that much and likely wouldn't have paid out of my own pocket to read it under regular market circumstances.
And I don't think I'm that much of a statistical outlier.
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