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Buy One Book, Get Twenty-Two Free
nojayuk writes "Jim Baen of Baen Books is releasing David Weber's latest space opera epic in the Honor Harrington series, War of Honor, with a CD-ROM bound in the back a la computer reference works. From the website, he says this CD-ROM will contain the complete text of 22 novels, including all the previous Harrington books by Weber as well as illustrations of book jackets, sound samples etc. The Baen website says the texts on the CD-ROM will be unencrypted, requiring no special readers or decoders. The files are in .rtf or .html format, and the buyer will be able to download them into their PDA of choice. Baen's website is already a rich source of free SF books for download; I've harvested quite a few myself in the past. Jim and many of his writers are advocates of this kind of promotion, dismissing talk about piracy as paranoia. Baen books also supports a Web subscription service for new books, another bonus for PDA bookreaders." We've mentioned the Baen library and its effects on sales in several previous stories; it'll be interesting to see how this CD-ROM helps or hurts.
He feels it won't have any negative impact on his sales at all, rather, he feels that by people reading his books, and then telling othere about them, he will infact boost his sales. ( From the intruduction to the free library )
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Baen Books also has 40 books available for free at Baen Free Library in HTML, Palm, RTF and other formats. Check it out.
Have you read any of Weber's Honor Harrington series? I think they're great as long as you keep in mind that they are truly of the "space opera" genre. Having them all on one CD will be very handy!
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
It has already been shown that the amount of money an author will typically make off of old books is so small as to be considered insignificant. Even if people obtain copies of the books legitimately, they might loan them from a library, buy them from half-price books or a book faire, or just plop down in B&N and read them there (Starbucks is making a killing).
To include all the books on CDROM adds no cost to the book (CDs are dirt cheap to mass produce), but it gives the reader an enormous additional benefit. In many cases, someone who actually wants to read the books cover to cover will probably buy them anyway, as books are still rather more convienent for most people than text files are. However, this gives them the opportunity to preview them, and if they DO want to read them via PDA, they have that option.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
They make a very big point about how everything is in rtf format. Pretty amazing. Sounds like they're trying to get the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, piracy thing going -- a la Adobe and Microsoft.
I see two things happening because of this. Weber gets a lot more popular because of his books being plastered all over Kazaa. His sales go way up. Frankly, it sucks to read a book on a computer screen, so people will go out and buy a copy if they like it. It's even better than the mp3 quality vs. audio quality CD thing.
Number 2, a lot of people get used to books being in an electronic, computer-readable format. Just like they got used to mp3s. Will help the e-book industry take off -- if book publishers are smarter than the RIAA. And they are, don't kid yourself about that.
the "Baen Free Library" is not a library. They remove the books posted online at any time they feel like, and prevent authors from posting more than 5 or 6 of their works. The intention of this is to promote variety (so their more prolific authors don't drown out the others, presumably because you would see 100 books by one author and completely miss a first novel by another.)
Am i criticising their actions? No. Do I demand their release all their books to the public domain--now? No. This is just a semantic criticism, which might seem obtuse to invoke over a slashdot post, but which seems fairly warranted given the source, a publisher, and their intention, marketing.
What they have is a sample area designed to increase sales Kindof like when you get HBO free for a weekend. Good for them.
But it's not a library. A library is a repository of knowledge where you can go to find things. I'm not being a snob. You could have a library of science fiction, even of books published by one publisher. Libraries just don't change to suit the marketing needs of publishers.
it makes you wonder if there is any correlation to talent or if the General reading public is truly a good representation to judge what is quality literature.
I posted this somewhere on slashdot before, but I'll reiterate: I used to work as a supervisor at Barnes & Noble. Believe me when I tell you that their bestseller list is nothing but marketing and hype.
The best example I can give you of this (apart from the Oprah list you already mentioned) is something Barnes & Noble calls "Out of the Box Bestsellers" - essentially meaning that, based on the popularity of an author and "how many copies have been pre-ordered from the distributors" (IE: how popular B&N wants to make it) a book will hit their bestsellers list BEFORE it's EVER sold a copy. Amy Tan's "Bonesetter's Daughter" was like that. Let's see...Tom Clancy, Rowling and Mary Higgins Clark were all like that as well.
Triv
I used to feel the same way, then I tried reading on my new laptop - the LCD screen is much nicer.