Humble Bundle Launches Its First eBook Bundle; Books From Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi & More

from the keep-it-up dept

The Humble Bundle folks continue to do cool new things based on their basic (awesome) business model of bundling up a bunch of cool indie content in a simple, user-friendly, pay what you want system (with a charitable component). They've gone through six video game bundles (it's hard to keep up!), and over the summer they did their first music package, with a bunch of cool albums from the likes of Jonathan Coulton, OK Go, They Might Be Giants and MC Frontalot. And... today they announced their very first ebook offering. Same basic deal: bundle of books, pay what you want. The basic package includes:

• Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, an intense story of youthful techno-defiance
• Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, a hard-hitting collection of 11 impactful stories
• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, an alternate Earth mystical science fiction tale
• Invasion: The Secret World Chronicle by Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libby, Dennis Lee, and Cody Martin, a modern military superhero saga packed with bonus content
• Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, a delightful fantasy collection of 11 stories
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, the cross-genre follow-up to Stranger Things Happen

As always with Humble Bundle, if you pay more than the ongoing average price paid by others, you also get some bonus content. In this case, it's

• Old Man's War by John Scalzi, a science fiction war epic
• Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, an ethereal graphic novel of a man’s last days

That's apparently the first time the Gaiman/McKean book is available in ebook form... There's also the charitable component. In most bundles, you can designate some of the money to go to EFF or Child's Play Charity -- and that's still true, but this time they've also added the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. It will be interesting to see how this goes. The music bundle did well, by any reasonable standard, but definitely didn't pop the way the video game ones did. It will be worth watching to see how this one goes as well, and if there are other ways that the Humble Bundle crew will continue to innovate.

Filed Under: cory doctorow, ebooks, humble bundle, john scalzi, neil gaiman, pay what you want
Companies: humble bundle