Free First E-Books From Del Rey/Bantam

Suvudu, the corporate SFF blog for several Random House imprints whose name (as far as I can tell) means nothing in particular, just announced that its corporate parent is following Baen Books' long-running experiment in giving away ebooks for free. (Baen's Free Library has been around since at least 2000.)

Suvudu has five books -- all beginnings of series, from writers as varied as Naomi Novik and Kim Stanley Robinson -- available for free download right now, in the hopes that, like heroin, giving away the first hit will create a life-long junkie.

And I think that, if you'd asked all of us in publishing which company would be the second to have free e-books, none of us would have picked Random House. (For last, maybe.) Congratulations to them, though I've seen some grumbling on Twitter about Suvudu's format restrictions -- Baen, by comparison, has most of its free books available in a wide variety of formats, including vanilla HTML.