The Humble Indie Bundle started out selling video games, but branched out into e-books down the road. This makes it almost, but not quite, symmetrical that its competitor StoryBundle, who started with e-books all along, has now come out with a bundle of…e-books about video games.
The base price for this bundle is $3, which gets you six DRM-free multiformat e-books, mostly non-fiction:
- How to Do Things With Videogames by Ian Bogost
- Atari Inc.: Business is Fun by Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel
- SCROLL: Collection 01-11 by Ray Barnholt
- Service Games: The Rise and Fall of Sega by Sam Pettus
- Ghosts in the Machine: A Short Story Anthology by Lana Polansky and Brendan Keogh
- The Gothic Tower & Associated Interactive Fiction (Plus Bonus Book Motorcyclus!) by Ryan Veeder
You can choose to pay however much you like beyond that amount. If you pay at least $12, you get three more e-books:
- Boss Fight Books #1: EarthBound by Ken Baumann
- Minecraft by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson
- The Final Hours of Portal 2 by Geoff Keighley
The Final Hours of Portal 2 includes both the e-book and a download key for the interactive Steam version. (I previously reviewed the interactive iOS app version for TeleRead.)
If you wish, you can opt to donate 10% to one of the three charities Challenger Center for Space Science Education, Girls Write Now, or Mighty Writers, and can also use a slider to set how much of your donation goes to the authors and how much goes to StoryBundle itself. (The default split is 70/30.) I still say that they really ought to use a system of sliders more like Humble’s so you can opt to donate more than 10% to more than one charity, but it’s good they’re making the gesture anyway.
Nice bundle. As a member of gen-x, I have fond memories from the Atari age on up to today.
Chris, did you know that you were quoted in the blurb for the Final Hours of Portal 2 book?
Huh. I didn’t even look at the blurb for it. That’s kind of neat.