snipped from Shelf Awareness
In another publisher experiment making material available at no cost on the Internet, Random House began offering the entire text of Beautiful Children, Charles Bock’s debut novel, for free online as of 12:01 this morning until midnight on Friday, Leap Day. Readers will be able to share, e-mail or print the text, which is available as a PDF download at beautifulchildren.net/read. In cooperation with Random, Amazon.com, B&N.com, Powells.com and Northshire.com are making the file available to their customers.
Beautiful Children, which first appeared in primitive print form at the end of January, concerns the effect of the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy in Las Vegas on his parents and others.
Incidentally last week, Random House Audio announced that it will no longer require that retailers use digital right management (DRM) when selling audiobooks via digital download. The company decided, it said, “that this move will allow for healthy competition among retailers targeting the iPod consumer, without posing any substantive increase in risk of piracy.” Still Random can use DRM for authors who want it.