^
Maybe they want a tax write-off? Maybe they want to get you to buy the missing 1st-in-series?
Personally, I'm inclined to think that simple good will is enough for most of us. A large proportion of the SFnal stuff I picked up I already owned either from back when the bulk of ORM's sf/f imprint was ported from e-Reads who used to be on Fictionwise, or their newer backlist acquisitions. And a lot of the stuff being given away is fairly obscure-ish titles/authors who've kind of fallen out of favour in the mainstream, and if even just a fraction of the people who picked up the freebies end up reading and reviewing a few of them on Amazon or elsewhere, then that gives them a lasting publicity boost for their backlist.
Going through the listings, I noticed a lot interesting new-to-me things and/or reprints of works which I hadn't thought would get e-bookized anytime soon, which are going on the wishlist for a future sale. Similarly, when looking at the other-category authors I'd never heard of before, many of them looked to have several non-free works which seemed like they could be things I'd want to read, which will also go on the wishlist for a future purchase if I try and enjoy the offered freebie.
I've liked ORM for years because they don't just focus on the current trendy bestsellers or supposedly enduring classics, but also brought back into print some fairly obscure stuff by established authors (viz. all the long OOP poetry and essay collections by mid-20th C novelists when they could have easily gotten away with just reprinting the most famous works), and regularly had $1.99-$2.99 sales on them. They could have kept just offering their daily public domain freebie and the sporadic special giveaway from their non-PD catalogue, and the daily discount deals, and I'd have kept saying nice things about them anyway.
As it is, I'm very thankful for this bonanza (literally almost half their catalogue, BTW, or 44.67%, to be precise) which has already pointed me in the direction of a lot of books that I'm interested in and didn't know about before, and be more than happy to continue singing their praises and recommending their books, which may very well be the point of the exercise.
