The Humble eBook Bundle Releases Today

The team at Humble Bundle is trying something new again; today they released their newest bundle, the Humble eBook Bundle.

Like their recent Humble Music Bundle, this is their first try at bundling indie eBooks for charity. What isn’t new, though, is the fact that you can choose your price for up to eight books. Any payment of a penny or more gets you six books, but if you pay more than the average payment you get an additional two.

As usual, you can choose how your payment is distributed between the authors, featured charities, and the Humble Bundle team (who pay for the bandwidth and do the footwork putting the bundle together). The featured charities change from bundle to bundle, but this time around you can help support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “a non-profit that defends your rights in the digital world”; Child’s Play Charity, which “works to channel the goodwill of the worldwide gaming community into video games and game systems for sick children in hospitals”; and/or the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, “a non-profit organization for authors of science fiction, fantasy, and related genres [whose] purpose ranges from informing, promoting, defending, and advocating for its members, as well as helping them with legal disputes and assistance with medical and legal expenses”.

Um…I feel like I’m forgetting something. What did I forget to mention?

Oh yeah–the contents of this bundle! Well, we have:

• Nebula and Hugo Award-winner Kelly Link’s fantasy and light horror short-story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners

• The first of Mercedes Lackey’s “modern military superhero saga” Secret World Chronicle series, Invasion

• Lauren Beukes’s fantasy mystery novel Zoo City, which won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award and 2010 Kitschies Red Tentacle for best novel.

• Nebula Award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories

• Cory Doctorow’s novel Pirate Cinema set in a “dystopian near-future…Britain [where] downloading movies is more illegal than ever”

And paying more than the current average also gets you:

• John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, the first installment in the Old Man’s War universe in which “humanity has expanded to the stars and discovered that other habitable planets are not only scarce, but contested by alien races”

• Signal to Noise, a fantasy graphic novel written by Hugo Award-winner Neil Gaiman and illustrated by World Fantasy Award-winner Dave McKean

All of the eBooks are DRM-free and downloadable in multiple formats including ePub, MOBI, and PDF, so you can read them on your PC, iPad, Kindle, and many other devices.

And here’s the trailer if you need some extra motivation to support indie authors, help charity, and add some good reads to your eLibrary.