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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.
Normally I would agree with you but when you hit your local bookstore and see the crap that the 'bestseller' list is rife with. Jackie Collins, Romance Novels, abd other shite, 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.
An Oprah Winfrey endorsement or even the book of the month club deal can drives sales up on what would normally be something that should be consigned to the bargain table at the end of the summer, or suitabale for wrapping fish. And we all know that Oprah is one of the literati. What kind of lemmings mentality have we come to where Oprah Winfrey can have a staff member read a book, tell the the Big O, Oprah, and the endorsement sells millions?
My point is that digital publish is great. I love it. Opens the medium to get more people reading. Although, as a newtwork engineer d00d I prefer to have the book in my hand than read it on a PDA. Call me retro. Can't imagine a long snooze in the tub with the good old PDA in hand.... I can always dry the book out.
And then taste is in the mouth, eyes, mind of the beholder. I for one look at the best seller lists and shudder. And to be fair, I will buy one at least once a month and read it, and sometimes I will be pleasantly surprised. Other times I choose to cringe in horror in the closet for a few days.
As for sci-fi. Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling seem to carry on the tradition well. Hard stuff with a sense of humor that is quite beleivable in a not so distant future. Allen Steel with this Moon backs a few years back were great as well. But I find more self on an ever increasing hunt for really good sc fi. How many Enders Game sequels can we have? Gibson needs to get off his ass and back to the Sprawl.
My point to this entire rant is that we need some quality to put on the medium for the would be publishers just start putting everything on to the insnanely popular shiny metal discs we all must have in our caves,homes. A bad book is a bad book no matter what the format.
I can't wait to get my DVD of the Ya Ya Sisterhood special edition with cutscenes, the book, the script, so I can put it on my Palm and have all the Ya Ya goodness whereever I go.
Put all the classics on the medium first. There is nothing worse than being on a plane or a trip with nothing to read, than having something bad to read.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Well, regardless of how much I hate DMCA and similar crap, the point is that the book costs a few dollars and it is much nicer to read from a paper form, while a copy an important piece of software costs hundereds and is equally useful, regardless of whether you have the original or a copy.
My point is that book writers can only boost their sales by giving free electronic copies away, while software companies not neccessarily so.
As a 'book passer/swapper/loaner/etc.', frequent library patron and advocate of learning by reading; I'm very impressed. How many of us have paid for every single book we've read? I don't know about you all, but I hardly buy books from my computer book club, amazon.com or the local store unless I can get them at a discount. The authors get a cut for each book that doesn't change if the retail provider or publisher offers it at 5-15% off. I love books but my pockets aren't deep enough for a $300 per month reading habit.
For those of you that like to learn and oftentimes find it hard to spend sixty, ninety, or two hundred plus dollars for your technical books, try your local Ollie's/Odd Lots or other clearinghouses like that. The books are sometimes six months old; but you still get them and they give you good foundations. You can buy 10 for what you may have spent on two in the bookstore. Check out sites like http://www.informit.com that provide a lot of Que and similar series books for free online. There is a wealth of material there.
Back to the main topic: those of you that whine about reading electronically sure spend a lot of time in front of a computer playing, writing code, etc.! If it's that hard, start applying yourself to creating readable displays for ebooks and the like...! I read a lot of web material and Adobe E-book reader, as well as Palm format documents in addition to my collection of printed material.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
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
WTF?!?
They don't want you to pirate their stuff. They want to be paid. What planet are you on right now?
They are being nice. They could have picked one format that is loaded down with tons of Digital Rights Management junk. Instead they skipped the DRM junk and released their books in unencrypted files. Just to make sure it is convenient for you, they release each book in five different formats: HTML, RTF, Palm Doc, Rocket eBook, and MS Reader.
The books that they put in the "Free Library" are free as in beer. You can make copies and hand them out to your friends. By the way, the first two books in the Honor Harrington series are in the Free Library. That's how I got hooked on HH.
Please don't pirate Baen ebooks. It's biting the hand that is being nice to you.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You completely ignored the reason I gave for the piracy: It is good advertising which results in more sales.
You got hooked on HH because of free books. You bought more because of free books. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, piracy accomplishes the same thing, especially when a better version is available at some cost. People who acquire the inferior version for free will often spend money for the better version. If those people would never have bought the book in the first place without the piracy, you have made a sale because of piracy.
These books are being made available on CD because Weber knows that he is no longer making a great deal of money from older books. He feels that any resultant priacy will actually result in a net gain for him.