Brandon Sanderson, the author who will be writing the final Wheel of Time book, has a limited number of signed hardcover copies of the first book in his Mistborn trilogy available on his website for $20 each. Last month I got a signed first edition copy of this book off of bookcloseouts.com (they’re all out now, unfortunately) since it should be a good collector’s item someday… plus I just love signed books. I’m a little over 100 pages into it now, and so far it is good. The Well of Ascension, the second book in the series, is currently out in hardcover, and the final book The Hero of Ages is scheduled to be released in October 2008.

Also available on Sanderson’s website is a free copy of his forthcoming novel Warbreaker. This is not a polished, finished novel, but the author wanted to make one of his books free under a Creative Commons license and also thought it would be a nice way to allow readers to contribute to the novel. It’s an interesting experiment, and I’ll be curious to see if he will do it again.

At the end of Warbreaker, Sanderson also included excerpts from some of his other books – his award-winning debut novel Elantris, Mistborn: The Final Empire, and his young adult novel Alcatraz: Versus the Evil Librarians. (The first line of Alcatraz cracked me up.)