For the month of March, Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods will be available to read online, free of charge. This is part of a promotion by Harper Collins where they’re putting a bunch of books online, figuring that reading them will get people interested in buying more of the authors’ works.

Yeah, it’s sort of a “first hit is free” take on reading. But considering how finishing the first books of two different Julie Czerneda series had me running around the county to find the rest of each trilogy, there may be something to it.

(via Neil Gaiman, with a follow-up on the nature of free)