I know a lot of people who won’t validate any Star Wars-related content that’s not absolute Canon, but please, take it from a life-long Star Wars fanatic, there’s tons of fantastic offerings in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

Since the release of the first Star Wars movie in 1977, there’s been over 200 novels published that have added to the legacy, beginning with Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, revived in the early 1990s by Timothy Zahn’s The Thrawn Trilogy, and continuing today with Del Rey’s Legacy of the Force series.

Now, Del Rey has the first Legacy of the Force book, Betrayal, online as a free download from now till May 13, 2008 at midnight. The novel, which was first published in 2006, is available in digital PDF, audiobook, Amazon Kindle e-book, and Sony Reader e-book.

Betrayal, written by Aaron Allston, takes place 40 years after the events of Star Wars: A New Hope and features the Skywalker and Solo families (which have certainly grown over the years.

From the official description: Honor and duty will collide with friendship and blood ties as the Skywalker and Solo clans find themselves on opposing sides of an explosive conflict with potentially devastating repercussions for both families, for the Jedi order, and for the entire galaxy.

Betrayal is being offered for free for this limited time as a promotion for Del Rey’s Invincible, the ninth and final book in the Legacy of the Force saga, due out on May 13, 2008.