In a May 3 post on the ClassicBattleTech.com news and announcements page (no specific item permalink that I can find, unfortunately), role-playing game publisher Catalyst Game Labs announces:
With the launch of the iPad (along with the Kindle, Sony Reader and others), electronic fiction reading devices have reached a critical mass. Catalyst is enthusiastically embracing this new medium and launching epub formats for both BattleTech and Shadowrun fiction.
These e-books include both old titles and new (I found out about this from a friend who was frustrated that the upcoming title A Bonfire of Worlds, for which he had been waiting quite some time, was not coming out in print) and can be found via Amazon (for the Kindle) or Catalyst’s BattleShop on-line store (in Kindle and EPUB) for a quite reasonable $4.99 or less.
The BattleShop versions are the better deal—for the same price as Amazon, they include both EPUB and AZW (Kindle) versions of the book, rather than just the Kindle version. It is unclear whether the e-books are bound by any sort of DRM, though given that Catalyst mentions both the iPad and the Sony which uses a different DRM scheme, I would guess not—at least in the BattleShop version’s case.
Catalyst says that it “remains committed to launching a print novel publication program,” but rather than wait for that to become possible, it is launching this e-book program now. While this may lead to frustration for those who, like my friend, would prefer a printed book, it means that e-book-reading BattleTech fans will be able to get the books now rather than having to wait.
Catalyst also offers a number of BattleTech role-playing game books as PDFs elsewhere on the BattleShop.
Okay, this makes me happy. I’ve got a soft spot for the Shadowrun books (including the first dozen or so in paperback). They’re not the best written things on the planet, but I love the idea of the setting.
For the curious, I just bought one of the BattleTech books from BattleShop and it indeed doesn’t seem to have any DRM on the epub file.
Sold, provided put up all the Shadowrun novels for sale – I’ve been trying to get a hold of them for a while now in electronic format, and only a select few are available. Right now they only have 5 novels up on the site, and I’d pretty much buy the entire library if they offered it. My paper copies are getting rather worn, and it’s getting increasingly harder to find replacement copies for some of them.