Random House announced today that they’re making a number of backlist books available in free digital format to users of the Lexcycle’s Stanza reader.  Included among the titles is the entirety of my own Hank Thompson trilogy: CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, and A DANGEROUS MAN.

Please note that Stanza is a reader app designed for Apple handheld devices.  There is a desktop version for PC, but the free books are only accessible through an Apple handheld.

My personal experience with the PC desktop version of Stanze was middling.  It requires an account setup to download the software, followed by a redirect to shop for books at Fictionwise, where another account is required before books can be downloaded.  That experience was crap.  And, let me say it again, you will not find the free versions of the Hank Thompson trilogy without an Apple handheld running Stanza.

However, I am told that downloading and using Stanza on an Apple handheld works quite well and that accessing the free books is smoothly accomplished.

If you think you detect a note of ambivalence, you are  correct.  I did not ask enough questions when I agreed to join this offering, and did so thinking the free books would be universally available to anyone who downloaded any version of Stanza.  My bad.

If and when the offer expands to other versions of Stanza, or other readers, I’ll post right away.

If and when I get a chance to try it out on an Apple handheld, I’ll write something about how it works.

In the meantime: in it’s desktop PC version, Stanza works just fine.  The Fictionwise site seems quite awful.