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Welcome to a new age in digital publishing. To celebrate the occasion, Tor has given SFX two very special prizes to give away to two winners in this brilliant competition – a pair of Babel Fish-shaped USB sticks loaded with the entire Tor library.
That’s over 150 books – including the full collections of Douglas Adams, Peter F Hamilton, China Miéville, Neal Asher, Gary Gibson and Adrian Tchaikovsky. Plus the Halo books, The Walking Dead novelisations and brand new fiction from emerging authors like Douglas Hulick, Mark Charan Newton and Adam Nevill.
So what’s the occasion? Well, from today, Tor UK, Pan Macmillan’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, has made its ebooks DRM-free (that Digital Rights Management-free) and available to purchase from Torbooks.co.uk and Panmacmillan.com , as well as through other retailers.
What does this mean to you? Now, once you purchase a Tor book, you can download it as many times as you like, on as many different ereaders as you like.
All Tor ebooks are available to buy from torbooks.co.uk .
“We believe that making our Tor ebooks DRM-free is the best for our readers, allowing you to use legitimately-purchased ebooks in perfectly legal ways, like moving your library from one ereader to another,” says Jeremy Trevathan, Publisher at Pan Macmillan. “We understand that DRM can make your ebooks less easy to read. It also makes building and maintaining your digital library more complicated. For these reasons, we are committed to remaining DRM-free.”
China Miéville has called the decision “a game changer”.
Cory Doctorow writing in the Guardian, agrees: “The decision by Tor Books to ditch Digital Rights Management signals the beginning of the end of the ebook format wars.”
Author and famed blogger John Scalzi goes even further: “DRM hasn't stopped my books from being out there on the dark side of the internet. Meanwhile, the people who do spend money to support me and my writing have been penalised for playing by the rules. The books of mine they have bought have been chained to a single e-reader, which means if that e-reader becomes obsolete or the retailer goes under (or otherwise arbitrarily changes their user agreement), my readers risk losing the works of mine they've bought. I don't like that. So the idea that my readers will 'buy once, keep anywhere,' makes me happy.”
The USB sticks we’re giving away are in the design of a Babel Fish, Douglas Adams’ infamous universal translators (‘small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe’ according to The Hitchhiker’s’ Guide to the Galaxy ) and come specially presented in anti-DRM wrapping.
To enter the competition, click here
UPDATE NOTE: Prize details have been slightly changed from the info we were originally given, which also means we’ve had to change the question, but never fear, people who have entered already – your entry will count.
