Proving once again that they care more about the genre as a whole than about themselves, Tor has opened an online book store offering speculative fiction from “most of the major publishers and a lot of the small presses as well” as an adjunct to their community-style web site (tor.com). At the moment, they’re only offering physical books, but they expect to add e-books into the mix in a few months.
Store Manager Pablo Defendini writes “In order to make the Tor.com Store a curated space for SF/F books, we’re taking advantage of our biggest asset: the voices of our bloggers. The Store’s Special Picks section features lists of books made up by our community of authors, artists, and bloggers—if you want a handy list of most of the books Jo Walton has blogged about on the site; if you want to know what books Ellen Datlow considers the most influential SF books (this week); or if you’re curious as to what books Leigh Butler considers to be the ‘sweatpants of literature’, this is the area of the store you want to check out first. We’ve got a nice handful of lists to start with, and we’ll be adding more continually.”
As if to prove their “publisher-agnostic attitude”, when I first logged in to the site, the featured book was a Bantam Spectra title (Norse Code by Greg Van Eekhout), and only one of the four featured “New Releases” was a Tor title (indeed, one of them is from PublishAmerica).