Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
I wonder if some (maybe many) of the people who work for Tor believed there was a "target date" and the freebies were planned based on that belief. When Tor Publishing missed that date and refused to provide any other information (in order to not again raise false hopes) the "believers" were embarrassed and when we asked (perhaps somewhat belligerently) when we could buy ebooks, they took out their frustration on us.
My reason for suggesting this is, after more than 30 years of marriage, I had an epiphany about arguments - I told my wife that the times I got most angry with her was when I knew that I was wrong.
If the people at Tor.com really meant to have ebooks available at the end of their giveaway, they may have been in a similar state. They were wrong, got caught being wrong, were embarrassed and instead of admitting they made a mistake, became angry with us. As we kept on (being logical) with our questions/requests, they became more angry & things snow balled from there.
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Honestly, there is no evidence that I can see from out here that anyone within TOR thought that they were going to sell E-Books. It was a promotion for this web site and they decided to give away freebies like E-Books and wallpaper to promote it. It isn't any more complicated than that.
It isn't like TOR is the first publisher that put the occasional book in electronic format, but really wasn't intending on selling books in that format. When I go to conventions, I find small publishers all the time who either put samples or maybe even one complete book on CD to hand out to people to try their stuff. They do it because it is cheap to do things that way, but they want you to buy their p-books.
As for the whole Amazon thing, I think that's just Amazon trying to make some deals for their reader, probably not much different from the Baen deal. The difference there is that Amazon's stuff has DRM. I doubt that TOR has much to do with that deal beyond just making their materiel available to Amazon.
Which makes me wonder if the reason for the delay is to try to argue for non-DRM books. Certainly if they intend to release stuff through Baen they would have to go that direction. I could see that complicating things for a big publisher like TOR, tho.
Jason