Michael Crichton - I don’t know what to label this: Ghoulish? Practical?

As a freelance reviewer for the Oregonian, I get a lot of books. Sometimes really strange books, like the marketing textbook I got that was written for Canadian students. I was just looking at all the books I had gotten recently. A number were paperback reprints, which are not something I would normally review, so I set them aside. But I realized today that many of them were reprints of Michael Crichton’s old books, like Prey and Andromeda Strain. And priced $2 more than most paperbacks, at $9.99.

It seems kind of ghoulish. I assume they knew he had cancer. But did he know they were planning all these reprints to hit just when everyone was mourning his loss? Or was he in on it?