I'd meant to say something last week about how four of this year's five nominees for the Hugo Award for best novel are being made available for free download exclusively to the fans who will be voting for the award—which basically means anybody who's registered to go to science fiction's WorldCon later this year. Once a requester's eligibility as a Hugo voter has been established, the four novels—Ian McDonald's Brasyl, Robert J. Sawyer's Rollback, John Scalzi's The Last Colony, and Charles Stross's Halting State—will be sent as RTF files with no DRM restrictions attached; recipients are on their honor not to distribute the texts outside their immediate households. (Efforts to secure permission to include the fifth nominee, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, in this packet were not successful.) The threat of piracy seems negligible, in any event: A week after the electronic editions became available, Scalzi—who organized the packet's assembly and distribution—says that about a hundred people have been sent the books so far.

(I've been asked to unpack that "basically" in the conditions of eligibility: In addition to the people who get to vote because they paid $200 to attend the WorldCon in Denver, people who paid $50 to be registered as non-attending members of the World Science Fiction Society can vote on the Hugos, too, and are eligible for the free books.)