I seem to recall that back in 2008 Macmillan had talked big plans about launching their own ebookstore. IMO that makes it doubly curious that Tor.com never launched an ebookstore. Update: A reader has pointed out that Tor UK has an ebookstore on the PanMacmillan website (thanks, RobC!). If I do get more info I will add to this post, but at this point it looks to me like the planned ebookstore may have fallen by the wayside. I have not yet received a response, nor even an acknowledgement that they might get back to me. When I realized today that the launch had never happened I queried Tor.com and Tor/Forge and asked for an update. So what happened to the ebookstore? I don’t know. I think they may have missed the window by a little bit, don’t you? Sure, there is an announcement and there is even a page on tor.com, but that page still shows the same placeholder image it showed last year: The thing is, Macmillan may have announced the ebookstore but they never actually got around to launching that ebookstore. No major publisher had made a similar effort, so I was eager to see if this ebookstore could succeed at selling ebooks and (more importantly) making customers happy.Īdmittedly, it hasn’t actually been a year since this ebookstore was announced, but with BEA 2013 kicking off tomorrow I thought that now would be the right time to look back and chart this ebookstore’s success. It was going to sell all of the frontlist and (available) backlist titles from Tor, Forge, Orb, and other imprints by the SF publisher Tor/Forge Books.

The Tor.com ebookstore broke with the much of the rest of the publishing industry and had a novel goal of selling DRM-free Epub ebooks directly to customers. This ebookstore, which was one of Macmillan’s two major DRM-free efforts of 2012, got a lot of attention last year. It’s been just under a year since Macmillan announced plans to launch an ebookstore at Tor.com, and what a year it’s been.

Tor forge