Ebooks are great, in an entirely different, and yet complementary way, to print books (see how I sidestepped the Sharks vs Jets style never-ending battle there?). A print book is a beautiful object that encodes itself with the memories of your experience with it even as you read it, a physical marker of something you’ve read and experienced. Plus it’s really easy to get authors to sign.
Ebooks lack the physical immediacy but make an asset of that. You can stack ebooks and they weigh far less than the same amount of print books, and I say that as someone whose Kindle groans under the weight of the titles on it but whose back doesn’t grown under the weight of my Kindle. Ebooks are light and adaptable and make a virtue of their differences to print books as much as their similarities. Plus, ebooks mean you can do things like Bundle Of Holding .
Bundle Of Holding is an initiative set up by a group of professional RPG authors to help the Child’s Play and Reading Is Fundamental charities. Child’s Play is the charity set up by Penny Arcade to help get toys and games to sick children worldwide, whilst Reading Is Fundamental is dedicated to making sure every child in the US has access to books and knows how to read, specialising in working with children from birth to eight years old. Both are incredibly good causes, and perfectly suited to a project like this.
The initiative itself is incredibly simple. You pledge any amount you want and use the sliders on the page to decide how much goes to cover upkeep of the site, how much goes to the authors and how much goes to the charities. You also have the option of donating over the average amount everyone else has donated. If you do, you get more books. If you don’t, you still get the basic package.
Once that’s done you complete your payment through Google, PayPal or Amazon and the books are sent to you for download. Each one is DRM free and comes in all major ebook formats including PDF, .prc, .epub and .mobi. Then you sync them to your reader and away you go.
And believe me you really should go for this, because not only is it a great cause, but the writers involved have some amazing RPGs in their credits. The list looks like this:
• Matt Forbeck ( Brave New World )
• Chuck Wendig ( Hunter: The Vigil )
• Jenna Moran ( Nobilis , Exalted )
• Stephen D Sullivan ( D&D / AD&D , Chill )
• Rafael Chandler ( Scorn , Spite )
• Mur Lafferty (the Warcraft and WoW tabletop RPGs)
• Sarah Newton ( Mindjammer , Legends Of Anglerre )
• Derek Pearcy ( In Nomine )
• Aaron Rosenberg ( Asylum , Spookshow )
• Allen Varney ( PARANOIA )
These authors worked on some of the greatest RPGs ever produced so you know they can throw a mean book together. Plus you can not only donate money to a good cause and get some great books for free but you even get to choose exactly how that money is split. It’s a fantastic system but there’s just one catch…
The offer closes this weekend.
So, if you fancy it, go, donate, help out and get some great books for your trouble. After all, free books for donating to charity? The only way it’d be better is if they gave away free tea and biscuits too…
Alasdair Stuart
Bundle of Holding link: http://bundleofholding.com/index/current
