Slashdot Mirror

what you failed to note:

1. Printed on the disc label is "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold"
2. Multiple, DRM free formats (currently Ebookwise/Rocket, Mobi/Palm/Kindle, EPUB/Stanza, Microsoft, Sony, RTF, HTML) with online HTML and "email to Kindle"
3. When they add a new format, you can re-download your books in the new format
4. If you buy the e-book version, you can download an .iso of the accompanying CD
5. http://oberon.zlynx.org/

I just got the Baen newsletter, and they have all 7 of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser on sale for $35.

Baen also sells ebooks - DRM free, multiple formats, and relatively inexpensive. http://www.webscription.net/

Also, they publish, with some of their books, the Baen CD - a CD containing all of the Free Library, the book you just bought, and a whole bunch of others, typically by that individual author. And the license is great - you can do anything you want with the cd - copy, give away - EXCEPT sell it. http://oberon.zlynx.org/ has all of them, with links to other distribution sites, all PERFECTLY LEGAL.

Jim Baen passed away last year (God rest his soul), but the people who continue to run the shop show no signs of lessening their commitment to these distribution channels. Science Fiction and Fantasy may not be your cup of tea, but what they are doing is great.

I guess I could just link to Baen Books here, or to any number of bands like the Barenaked Ladies who oppose DRM and have somehow managed to make an oodle of cash. If examples don't convince you, then you should think about the theoretical persepective that file sharing is nothing more than advertising for the work in question.

Baen has been including promotional CDs with selected hard-cover novels. You can get a copies of the cds here: http://oberon.zlynx.org/
Baen has a free library from many of their aurthors you can read them here: http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

I've only bought 2-3 hardback books from them, but they've all been the ones with the CDs. (The CDS contain the text in txt, rtf, doc, html, and lit format.) If slashdot really wanted to collectively put our money where our mouth is we'd buy a copy of the 2-3 books or find other publishers that do the same thing and start making a list of books that have the text DRM free at no additional charge. I couldn't afford entire 10 book series from David Weber, but I can afford one book that has e-books of the rest of the series with it. I'm cheap and can support baen. If I've been able to do this, others should be able to do something similiar for the book genre that they like.

Insert Baen vs Tor troll here. :)

But I'm a *huge* military SF fan. Oh, btw, torrents for the CDs. http://oberon.zlynx.org/ For those who don't have them already.

Baen has put a bunch of ebook/multimedia cd's out with the hardback versions of a number of books. The licensing is quite liberal: in a nutshell, you can give it away, but just can't sell it.

There's a site for torrents for all of them at http://oberon.zlynx.org/. I try to seed whenever I can, but it can be spotty, so be patient.

Oh yeah - Buy Baen Books!

And a link to the Baen CDs themselves. http://oberon.zlynx.org/

Lots of good stuff, licensed to be free as in beer, and with very liberal distribution terms.

"There's no better way to kill a book than to make it available for anyone to read for free."

If that is true, then why is Baen still in business?

Files here

Permission here

But you can post entire CDs containing whole series of Baen published books!

http://oberon.zlynx.org/

Baen gets it, which is why about 80% of the books I have bought in the last 2 years has been from Baen(of course the fact they have some awesome authors has something to do with it, too)

In addition to the Baen free library, Baen has also put 7 freely distributable cds containg many books into some of their hardcover books, with the text "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold."

This site and this site both host the first 6 cds as web browsable books.

This site contains torrents for all 7 cds.

As mentioned in slashdot before, Baen publishing puts out Webscriptions and also gives away ebooks for free on the net and they also provide a CD in several of their books with a large number of novels included. All of the free ebooks in the free library and on CD can be shared but not sold.

Here are several ISO images of Baen's free science fictional goodness, please leave up your bittorrent client for others to share.

According to Baen the contents of the CD's are free to distribute.

In HTML two can be found at the following.

War of Honor CD and

Hell's Faire CD are online.

This is a legal way to distribute them.
They can be downloaded (BitTorrent) as a Zipped iso or plain iso from CD ISO's
The list of available cd images are:

War Of Honor
Hell's Faire
The Far Side Of The Stars
There Will Be Dragons
This Sceptered Isle
Windrider's Oath


The Box is open

...the Baen bound-into-hardcover CDROMs would make a great addition to any library. Best of all, since they're freely copyable, all it would cost would be a CDROM blank...and they could be easily replaced if anyone broke or lost them.

I've actually taken to putting all five of them (available via BitTorrent at this website), three Blackmask.com public domain book CDROMs, and the free works of Cory Doctorow on a single DVD+ROM and handing it out to folks who have DVD drives.

I'd like to see some of the Baen fantasy works adapted. The Bahzell books by David Weber, the SERRAted Edge urban fantasy series by Mercedes Lackey, the Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon.

(Incidentally, all five thus far of the Baen bound-in freebie CDs' ISOs--the ones with explicit permission to copy and share noncommercially--are now being distributed via BitTorrent at oberon.zlynx.org: that's one each from David Weber, David Drake, and Mercedes Lackey, and two from John Ringo. Get 'em while they're well-seeded and don't forget to stay connected until you've uploaded at least as much as you downloaded!)