Casino Royale by the long-deceased Ian Fleming is the vintage classic 1st in his long-running James Bond series of subgenre-setting espionage thrillers, which I'm not going to wiki-link you in any way because if you've managed to make it this far in life without encountering the extended franchise before, well, you should probably treasure your innocence because it must be a rare and wonderful thing in this pop-media saturated age. Anyway, this originally appeared in 1953 from Pan Books, has been adapted into two films (technically, only one is really an adaptation and the other is some sort of namesake transplant from an alternate universe made of WTF?!), and is now being offered free courtesy of publisher Random House Canada's New Canadian Library imprint.
Technically, these and all of Fleming's prehumous work are public domain in Canada and other Life+50 countries, but RHC's NCL looks to be offering decently-formatted versions of them with nice-ish covers for a reasonably low price if you don't want to go hunting through PG Canada or other sources (though they'll have to lower the price even further to compete with HarperCollins Canada's 99 cent versions which admittedly have lazy boring covers in comparison). This is the iTunes Canada store's featured Free Book of the Week, incidentally.
Currently free, probably just through next Monday @
Amazon &
Kobo &
iTunes &
Google Play (all available to Canadians, and not free outside for obvious reasons).
And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Because having a highly popular vintage franchise hit the public domain and be picked up for cheap-o profit-maximizing e-prints by not just one, but two of the major publishing houses, just might help to keep Our Current Conservative Government® from messing around too much with our current Life+50 PD & fair use situations like they keep threatening to roll over and play dead for foreign corporate interests.
Enjoy!
Description
British Secret Service agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, is sent to play in a high-stakes baccarat game in an effort to take down Le Chiffre, a financier for the villainous SMERSH. Things get more complex when Bond is partnered with Vesper Lynd, a beautiful and smart MI6 employee with a dark secret.
James Bond is one of the most iconic characters in 20th-century literature. In addition to the 12 novels and 9 short stories written by Ian Fleming, there have been over 40 novels and short stories written about the spy by other authors, and 26 films produced, starring actors such as Sean Connery and Daniel Craig as 007.
Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in ebook form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.