You wouldn’t know it from their site… or their eBook application… or from any of their advertising really, but Borders is trying to entice people over to their eBook store by giving away free eBooks. The first few, all classics, automatically come with the desktop application when you download it:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
• Dracula, by Bram Stoker
• Grimms’ Fairy Tales, by the Brothers Grimm
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Unfortunately, unlike other books in the bookstore, these don’t show up in your library when you access the store in your browser, meaning you can’t download them in ePub format.

However, they are also giving out free eBooks for the next week (starting today, July 9th and running through July 14th) that you can access from your library, but getting them is a bit trickier. For one, at the time that I wrote this post, when I searched the store within the application, only one of the listed books showed up as free, while the others showed up at full price. Another quirk is that if you try to buy the free books from within the application, you still have to enter your credit card information, but if you get them from the Borders site, it only takes a single click to “purchase” them. These books are (link to the page on the Borders store included):

[EDIT: After I put this list together, I discovered there's also a section in the store labeled "Free for a Limited Time" that has all of these listed, making it much easier.]

• Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, by Dean Koontz
• One Shot, by Lee Child
• The Alchemyst, by Michael Scott
• Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, by Julia Child
• Master Your Metabolism, by Jillian Michaels

In addition there’s a Free eBooks section, although you can’t add these to your library, just download them in PDF or ePub form (in addition, these are mostly scans of varying quality, some of them pretty bad).

The greatest part is that you can download these in ePub format, which is supported by nearly every eBook reader except for the Kindle. Granted, that’s one big gaping hole in support, but for everyone else you can put it on your eReader even if you don’t have one of the Borders-endorsed ones.

It was pretty exciting to know that someone thought my game was good enough to use at their own tabletop, and he added his own unique, dramatic flourish to the game that made it a lot more interesting. If I use it again somewhere, I’ll definitely steal some of the ideas he added into it. Check it out at his Obsidian Portal page – just scroll down to the comments.