Tomorrow! Tomorrow!

...is only a Free Comic Book Day away.

How will you celebrate this geekiest of holidays?

Josh Ritter, Live and Free

I've blogged about Josh Ritter -- a great modern singer/songwriter who both writes killer songs like "The Temptation of Adam," "Rattling Locks," "Harrisburg," and "Girl in the War" and leads a great rocking band to deliver those songs with grace, style, and pure heart-of-rock-and-roll power -- several times before. (He's also that guy who was on Letterman last night, if you need an immediately cultural reference.)

But I know I like to discover music by listening to it on my own terms -- I download a lot of free stuff so it comes up on my iPod and elsewhen, and so I'm not as interested in streaming music that I can't take and live with for a while. And maybe you're like me, too.

Well, now you can grab a big handful of really good Josh Ritter stuff -- the entire live album Live at the Iveagh Gardens -- which recorded a great show at a unique venue in Dublin, where Ritter has a strong, enthusiastic following. This is a double album, folks -- those of you as old as me will know what that means -- with well over an hour and a half of great live music by one of today's smartest and thoughtful artists. And you can get that for free!

But wait! That's not all! (Imagine this in your best smarmy-late-night-infomercial voice.)

The free version of Live at the Iveagh Gardens also includes two songs from his new album, The Beast in Its Tracks, including the lovely first single "Joy to You Baby."

It comes via NoiseTrade, so you know it's all legit. And it probably won't be there forever, so get it now.

Free Matt Hughes!

Free him from the drudgery of having to do anything else but write his books, by causing immense piles of money to head his way from his massive sales!

How can you do this? It's easy -- first, download the sampler of his new book, Hell To Pay. (You may wish to consult reviews of the first two books in that trilogy, The Damned Busters and Costume Not Included. We'll wait while you do.)

Then, thrilled by the wonder that is Matt Hughes, go out and buy all of his books right away! Buy them for all of your friends and family members! Buy them as gifts for that old codger at the golf club! Buy them to hand out at the next Rotary Club meeting! Buy them until Matt Hughes is rightly regarded as one of our best writers, as he so obviously is!

Yes, you can Free Matt Hughes! All you you need to do to begin is download and read!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like...

To help you get into the festive mood of the season, NoiseTrade have made available one of the great Christmas albums -- Over's the Rhine's 2006 Snow Angels -- absolutely free.

Now, you can leave a tip -- I know I paid for that record when I got it a few years back, and it was well worth it -- but you don't have to; you can get it for absolutely nuttin', if you want.

And I do recommend you check it out -- if you're not sure, listen to "Darlin' (Christmas Is Coming)"  and "Here It Is" for the joyful side and "Snow Angel" and "All I Ever Get for Christmas Is Blue" for the other persuasion. It's a great record, it's perfectly apropos right now, and it's completely free.

Hey -- you can listen to all of the songs right in this here widget, without even clicking off to NoiseTrade. C'mon, I can't coddle you any more than that, can I?

Trillions! Trillions! Trillions!

Most of the projects I work on for my day job never get mentioned here, because they're deeply technical and only of interest to accountants, CIOs, and similarly specialized business folks. But, once in a while, I do have something that's more exciting that that, and this is one of those times.

Yesterday was the official publication date for Trillions, a great book on what pervasive computing will mean for business and society, from three very smart and very savvy technologists/designers/thinkers, Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay, and Mickey McManus. They're all part of MAYA Design, a Pittsburgh firm that does amazing work on interface design and other things I don't even have the terminology to describe. (When I visited them last year to talk about marketing for Trillions, they showed off an amazing system called Visage that they created for DARPA to manage and control manifold real-time dataflows for a battlefield.)

So Trillions is genuinely visionary, and comes from three guys who really know and live this stuff. It's an exciting book to be (a tiny) part of.

I'd like to get more copies of Trillions out there, particularly in the hands of SF folks and influential Internet people. (And who else would be reading this blog?) In the past, I've sent out queries to people I knew on books of less direct interest to the field, but I think I've already outstayed that welcome. So, this time, I won't spam anyone; I'm just looking for inbound interest. I'll be happy to send a copy of Trillions to you if you'll read it and possibly blog/talk/write about it -- I'm not looking for guarantees, just interest. I might be able to swing e-books in some format as well, though it's still much easier to ship blocks of dead tree.

Check out the website, which has a bunch of fascinating videos about what MAYA has done and the topic of the book, and shoot me an e-mail if you're interested in a copy of Trillions.

C'mon! It's the only book at Wiley I've worked on that has a quote from a SF writer! (And probably the only one that ever will!)

"Trillions is bold, unabashed, ingenious, and absolutely fizzing with insights about the new-modern process of blending design, high-tech, and commerce. Always entertaining and mostly right on topic."

 - David Brin

Free Josh Ritter Sampler!

On of my current favorite musicians -- and The Wife's hands-down current favorite -- is the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, whom I've mentioned here a few times.

And now you don't have to take my word for it; he's got a sampler on NoiseTrade which could be absolutely free if you want. (If you want to pay something, they're happy to take your money, but they don't require it.)

The sampler has eight songs, including two live cuts, and includes some of Ritter's best songs. And, again, you can get it absolutely free if you want.

So don't say I never gave you anything. (Even though it's true: I didn't give you this, after all.)

Free MP3s!

And these are the legal kind, too!

If I weren't crazy busy right now -- which, of course, I am -- I'd be poking through this selection of free MP3s (from Amazon, of course, who have proven themselves masters at hooking consumers with low prices and then landing them with higher prices once that hook is firmly set) for stuff I like right now.

If you have more time than I do, click this banner. (Amazon seems to think I might make some money if you do, which seems like an Underpants Gnome Scheme to me, but what the heck. I could use a blog post tonight to prove I made it home safely.)

Free Green Lantern!

And many others as well. In case you didn't know, this coming Saturday -- May 2nd -- is the annual Free Comic Book Day across North America.

All you have to do is walk into a participating comics shop, say "My good man, do you have a FREE COMIC BOOK for me?" and walk out with five minutes of trashy disposable entertainment in a form most adults gave up on decades ago.

A list of the potential wonders that await you is here. You may search for the elusive "participating comics shop" via a search box on that self-same page.

Happy Free Comic Booking!

Get Killola's "I Am The Messer" Album for Free!

When I did my "best of the year" lists for Green Man Review, about six weeks ago, one of the songs I mentioned was "This Is How the World Ends" by Killola, a great big slab of straight-ahead, old-fashioned rock behind a female singer who knows how to really belt.

And I've been listening to that song for a while, and vaguely looking for the album it was from -- and then, today, I learned that the band was giving away the record for free on the Internet, so I just nabbed it for myself. If your tastes are anything like mine, you may want to do the same.

There should be a widget below with the album, and the band's website is here. Hope you enjoy it. (Even better: the title text for their home page is "KILLOLA : DRINK BEER, EAST, GIVE SANDWICH TO DOG, NORTH, WAIT, WAIT, GET DEVICE, PRESS HITCHHIKE.")

Edit, two hours later: I've now listened to some of the other songs, and I should note that they all have short (mostly about 3-5 second) introductions from the band, giving the name of the song and saying that they're free courtesy of the name of the service. I'm finding that annoying enough that I expect I'll buy the record before too long...which, I'm sure, is the point. But I am enjoying the music.


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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.

Kibbles and Bits

In case you haven't already heard, Kelly Link's swell second short-story collection Magic for Beginnners (in nearly its entirety) is being made available for free digitally to celebrate the publication of her new YA collection, Pretty Monsters.

And, in completely different news, I reviewed Rutu Modan's collection Jamilti and Other Stories
yesterday for ComicMix.

Free Books!

Everyone else has already linked to these announcements, but I may have some readers as curmudgeonly and reclusive as myself, so...

1) Jeff VanderMeer's book The Situation was made available as a free download via Wired -- and can also be found in an infinitely snazzier collection of paper, boards, and glue from PS Publishing.

2) Night Shade Books has put up Richard Kadrey's novel Butcher Bird, also completely for free. (It's on this page, with a couple of other free things.) Butcher Bird is also published using the more traditional "you pay money and get a handsome trade paperback" methodology.

3) The mad geniuses at Tor Books have been giving away e-books for a couple of weeks now, as part of a plot (revealed recently) to get fans to sign up for what promises to be a really snazzy new homepage/community/blog/what-have-you.

So go read something, won't you?

Blog in Exile: Stuff to Read for Free, 6/26

The Millions pointed me to an early, short, Haruki Murakami novel, Pinball, 1973, available online as a PDF in an English translation by Alfred Birnbaum.

Blog in Exile: Stuff to Read for Free, 6/21

SF Signal has posted an excerpt from Gail Z. Martin's upcoming novel The Blood King.

New at Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, a new OSC story, "A Young Man With Prospects."

Blog in Exile: Stuff to Read for Free, 6/20

Jayme Lynn Blashke has posted the opening of his story "Being an Account of the Final Voyage of La Riaza: A Circumstance in Eight Parts" (available in its entirety in Interzone issue #210).

Blog in Exile: Stuff to Read for Free, 6/18

Robin Hobb has posted an excerpt from her upcoming novel Renegade's Magic. [via Pat's Fantasy Hotlist]

F&SF has posted Chris Willrich's story "The Thief With Two Deaths" on their website.

Blog in Exile: Stuff to Read for Free, 6/13

The Eos Blog has just posted chapter 1 of Lois McMaster Bujold's new novel, The Sharing Knife: Legacy -- and they call it "excerpt one," so there will be more to follow.

Every so often, I like to remind people that Eric Flint serializes, daily, large chunks of his novels on his website -- today, which was pretty typical, brought snippet #25 of 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, snippet #35 of Pyramid Power, and snippet #13 of The Mirror of Worlds.

Blog in Exile: Stuff to Read for Free, 6/11

Tobias Buckell has posted the first third of his first novel, Crystal Rain, for free on his website in a variety of formats. (And the book itself, for those intrigued by the taste, is newly available in paperback at the usual places.)