Beautiful Children: Downloading tips for free edition of Random House bestseller—and a friendly suggestion for Random
Was Random House really giving away free PDFs of Beautiful Children, the much-talked-about bestseller by Charles Brock, at least through midnight on Friday? Must be. The TeleBlog’s Paul Biba obtained the book for himself that way. Way to go, Paul! But right now I can’t get through to the download address. Anyone else having problems? The beautifulchildren.net domain seems unreachable as I write this (update: not everyone is having problems; meanwhle here’s an AP story).
But wait! An Amazon page works fine—scroll down for the download link, which might change. You may want to use Mobipocket Desktop to turn the PDF into a format fit for a handheld. In the future, I’d hope, Random will use the IDPF’s .epub standard to eliminate the need for such hassles.
The Book Itself
Read the reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post and Publisher’s Weekly about this coming-of-age novel written by a pawnbroker’s son.
Some big questions—going by the reviews: Why would a 12-year-old in a Las Vegas suburb run away from his loving parents? And what does the book say about generational wars? Or another theme, the sexual landscape today? No, this is family-type fare. For what it’s worth, however, as of now, Amazon readers are rating the book three-and-a-half stars out of five.
The DRM angle
Meanwhile kudos to Random House. I hope that Random will next think about experimenting again with sales of DRMless books, perhaps with watermarking–just anything to get around the present mess. Yes, I meant “experiment again.” In a past Fictionwise experiment, Random House did try sales of DRMless books by new writers. Never did find out what happened.
Here’s another idea. The current freebie of Beautiful Children isn’t DRMed, and perhaps one possibility would be to sell nonDRMed versions for a longer time than Random is offering the free B.C. samples. Either way, Random would be creating buzz for the book online.
Now that Random is dropping DRM for most audio books—the company is still keeping watermarking—it truly would be timely to try the same approach for e-books. Go by Real Life, not what the DRM peddlers claim.
Reminder: Download before midnight on Friday. If you don’t, you can find DRMed versions on sale for Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader and Adobe Reader 7 and perhaps other formats. Yep, I see there’s a for-sale Kindle version. Oh, for the days when .epub’s the norm and I don’t have to worry about these details!
Technorati Tags: Random House,Fictionwise,Beautiful Children,Charles Brock
February 27th, 2008 at 9:37 am
the site, beautifulchildren.net, is working and reachable.