David A. Harding
Sunday, 28 Nov 2004
...To Baen Books. As far back as I can remember Baen (dead tree) books have always been a prominent part of my burdening Sci-Fi/Fantasy book collection. Baen published books have numerous Hugos, Nebulas, and other awards to their credit. I'm unsurprised when I glimpse at the NYT Best Seller's list and find the familiar name of a Baen Books author. That's their job though and I've praised them enough over the years by putting my money where my mouth is. Today I would like to praise the good things they as a positive step towards ``Free Culture''.
Point 1: Their main page has a prominently placed EFF logo, with link.
Point 2: Jim Baen allows free (as in beer) redistribution of the CDs that come in the back of several of those books (even the NYT Bestsellers). The license is thus: You may redistribute it as long as you don't change it or make money from it. I myself share these over bittorrent.
Point 3: Baen has a ``free library'' of e-books. It's a pretty extensive library too; I guess it to contain at least one book from about eighty percent of Baen's authors. Eric Flint (the ``First Librarian'') makes some points about why the free library is important, here is the first:
``1. Online piracy - while it is definitely illegal and immoral - is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.''
The other points Eric make address what to do about that ``practical problem'' and are functionally equivalent to what Creative Commons is all about.
Point 4: Baen provides every single one of their books published in the last five years in an e-book format. That's only a tiny step ahead of their competitors and isn't much exciting on it's own... except they DO NOT use any DRM. They'll let you read the book directly from their website or let you download it in a number of open formats (I use RTF which translates perfectly to ASCII text using catdoc).
Baen provides a lot of other nifty services for readers but there outside the scope of this blog. I hope that anyone interested in checking out e-books gives Baen a look-see.
Caveat: Once, about five years ago, Baen sent me a free signed copy of one of their books for participating in a discussion with David Weber (probably their top money-making author). While this may have influenced me on some level I'm really happy that Baen is DTRT with e-books which are now my preferred medium for entertainment books.