As an ebook company, it’s a bit different for us to offer free ebooks than it is for a company like Tor. In the case of a traditional print company, they’re hoping a free ebook will boost print sales. Ebook sales are, at this point, a very nominal part of their business so they can take free ebooks as a loss leader.

In ebook publishing, there are several different factors at play that don’t allow for this to happen. 1) authors work completely off royalties. So giving away an ebook means the author is giving up that money. There was no advance.

2) We can’t take ebooks as loss leaders because they are the majority of our business, not a nominal part. So it would be a total write-off for us to give away a free ebook in all formats.

Now that I’ve laid the background, I’ll go back to your question, why Kindle? Because Kindle is a closed system. You can’t read a Kindle format book on your computer, I don’t know of any way to share it with friends at this point, though I suppose someone might know of a way. It’s stored either on your Kindle or your Amazon account. That means by giving it away in a closed system, we’re not giving it to every ebook pirate in the free world. And we’re specifically targeting those customers, trying to get them hooked into buying our books on the Kindle.

I’m sorry people feel upset by this, and in the future we’ll look at other free giveaways. I also know that viscerally, to people, the business explanation behind it doesn’t matter. They only know that they’re not getting something free that someone else is, and I’m sorry for that. However, there are always a lot of free ebook giveaways on the Samhain Cafe and the website, so there are other ways of taking advantage of the freebies!

This may seem like a dumb question but, do you have to have a Kindle in order to download and read the book? I don’t have a Kindle so I was wondering if I could download the ebook to my computer and just read it from there.