[starrigger]

I'll try to answer several questions and comments in one go here. First, regarding Tor's ebooks, all I know is that they're supposed to be on sale through Baen's Webscriptions, soon, and DRM-free. Beyond that, your guesses are as good as mine, and maybe better.

As for what I can or might offer with Sunborn: there are several ways of looking at the question, and they don't all lead to the same conclusion. To best satisfy the ebook audience, Robo's suggestion of putting it up in the formats that Tor doesn't offer makes the most sense.

But, much as I want to support the ebook community, that's not my only need here. My need is to promote the Tor hardcover and, to a lesser degree, the Tor ebook. If I am to continue being happily published by Tor (not to mention happily paying my mortgage), they need to see books moving out of the bookstores. To do that, it makes the most sense to put up for free download the format that's likely to be downloaded (and, one hopes, read) the most. And that's PDF.

I don't even like the PDF format. But if there's one thing my project here has shown, it's that people download more PDFs than all the other formats put together. And that's an audience that draws heavily from this community right here, an audience that's far more ebook-savvy than most. Even more surprising: when offered the choice of PDFs optimized for big screens, or tagged to reflow on small screens, far more people pick the former. Weird, huh? Or maybe not. Maybe the majority of people still download books to try them out on their computers, and if they like them, they go looking for the paper edition. I don't know.

In any case, it appears that offering the book in PDF will get the attention of more readers at large than any number of formats that most of us here would rather read it on. Plus, I have a PDF in hand right now. I didn't design or create it. It was provided by the printer for archival purposes. And no, unfortunately, it's not tagged for small screens. (I don't have any way to tag it, but maybe someone here could help out with that.)

For other formats, I need a clean source file. That means either:

1. Sitting down with the manuscript and laborious entering all the changes, and doing all of the other prep work to get from original submission file to ebook-ready file. It's a lot of work. Trust me.

2. Converting, if I can get my hands on it, the publisher's Quark file to something I can work with.

3. Waiting until Tor puts out their ebook, and if they offer it in html, using that as a source file.

Now, I did all of the hard work in (1) for these three books, in part because it was the only way to get them into ebook, or even to have them widely available at all. But with the new book being available in fresh new hardcover, as well as in Tor ebooks, you can see that it's a lot harder to justify putting all that time into creating my own versions.

Probably I'll do something like this: when the book is published, make the PDF available online. (Maybe ask help here in getting a tagged version made, if someone can do it from the existing PDF.) Then, when the Tor ebook is out, see what formats they're missing and, if I can get a workable source file, ask help here in filling in the gaps.

That's my working plan at the moment. Of course, it might all change tomorrow, if I see the flaws in my reasoning by light of day, or if a good source file comes my way. Fair enough? :)