A month and a half since Baen made the jump to Amazon availability, the publisher is about to add another feather to its cap. On her forum on the Baen Bar, publisher Toni Weisskopf has mentioned that Baen e-books will soon be available DRM-free in Apple’s iBooks store. A formal announcement will be made when the exact timeframe has been nailed down. As with the current Amazon deal, EARCs and monthly discount bundles will continue to be exclusive to Baen. The time since the program happened has seen some minor controversy erupt on the Baen Bar. After December 15th,...

Since I originally posted about Baen’s deal with Amazon, a couple more details of about the deal have come to light. First of all, the deadline for buying any of the old Baen bundles is Saturday, December 15th. That’s when the deal with Amazon goes live, and the old $10, $15, and $18 monthly bundles vanish, replaced by the higher-priced single books only. If there are any old bundles you might want, better look at and snap them up now. They’ll soon be gone. Second, there has been some discussion over what is to happen with the monthly serialized...

Toni Weisskopf has posted a series of messages to the Baen Bar indicating major changes in the offing for the Baen Ebooks (nee Webscriptions) store. Baen is finally on the verge of getting its titles placed directly into Amazon (and is negotiating with others such as Barnes & Noble, etc.) The problem is, that comes with pesky contractual obligations. The changes amount to the following: “Old” bundles containing books that have already been published will no longer be available for bundle-priced purchase. (Already-purchased ones should still be available for download, though it is possible some books may...

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I still mean to get the whole series reviewed so it’s time I got around to another one. As with prior reviews in the series, in each review I’ll include spoilers for previous books or stories but not spoil the ending of the current one. (Too much, anyway.) Remember that if you should want to read this or other books in the series based on my reviews, all the books up through Mission of Honor are available as free e-books via the Fifth Imperium Baen CD site, from...

Crain’s New York Business has a profile of Tor’s plan for a DRM-free e-book store. (The article is paywalled, but you can read it via Google News search.) It summarizes the situation with the DoJ antitrust lawsuit, and points to that suit and the success of the DRM-free Harry Potter e-book store as the reason publishers are seriously considering DRM-free options. That said, there is some new material here. Tor founder Tom Doherty and manager of science fiction Patrick Nielsen Hayden talk about wanting to build the kind of “diverse retail economy” you see in bookstores, and are in...

Publishing Perspectives has another of those guest-column-cum-self-promotional pieces it runs every so often, this one from Jonas Lennermo, creative director of Publit—the company who provides the e-commerce solution used by Harlequin Scandinavia, as well as several large and 200 small publishers in Scandinavia. Lennermo discusses the benefits of publishers selling their books D2C (Direct To Consumer), bringing up O’Reilly and McSweeney’s as examples. (But not Baen, for some reason. Everyone always seems to forget about Baen.) But while O’Reilly and McSweeney’s are publishers who know how to do D2C with smashing success, they also use proprietary, self-developed systems that...

I watched Ghostbusters with my parents recently, and as I was watching the first five minutes, featuring a ghost in a big old library, I was struck by how dated that part of the movie is now, with those big card catalog drawers opening and cards spewing out all over. You’d be hard-pressed to find a physical card catalog in many libraries these days; even the small public library from the town where I grew up is all computerized now. And that thought again came to mind when I came across Ars Technica’s look at the present and future...

On the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum has a rebuttal to a number of recent posts about e-book production costs and price, including the post by Mathew Ingram that I covered here. Though the article is replete with quotes and counter-arguments, but the central thrust seems to be that publishers ought to be able to charge what they want to—but they really should be wanting to charge less. At base, copyright holders have the right to ask what they want to get for their work (which is why they were so concerned about Amazon selling ebooks...

We live in an age of miracles. When you look at the current state of technology, of medicine, of transportation, that’s true in general (even if few people realize it), but it’s particularly true when it comes to publishing. I’ve lately been working my way through Barry Malzberg’s Engines of the Night, a collection of essays about the state of science fiction publishing prior to 1980 (republished by Baen as the first part of Breakfast in the Ruins), and wow is it pessimistic. An oft-repeated theme is how many works of high-quality SF never saw print because the magazine...

We’ve all encountered e-book scanning and markup errors , but most of these errors only affect the e-books themselves. It’s a rare error that actually feeds back into the print editions of the books, too! However, I recently came across just such an error. I was working on the TVTropes page for Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe stories (warning: TVTropes links may be hazardous to your free time) when I got into an argument with another troper over the applicability of a particular trope to the series. Over the course of the argument, it came out that...

Yesterday was a day for reactions to the Tor DRM-free announcement, for sure. John Scalzi has a post in which he applauds the move, while featuring a quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden in which pnh indicates that Tor will in no way be scaling back its efforts to fight piracy just because it’s dropping DRM. Scalzi feels this is a victory for people who “just want to own their damn books” and suspects that other publishing houses will be following suit. Charlie Stross has another lengthy post to his blog, following up on his post last week about Amazon’s...

In Mike Shatzkin’s latest essay about publishing, collecting his insights about this year’s London Book Fair, an interesting paragraph leaps out at me. Shatzkin was talking to Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne about the DRM-free release of the Harry Potter books, and reports being startled by what Redmayne had to say about Potter piracy: Apparently, Potter ebook files started showing up on file-sharing sites pretty much right away after they opened. But before they could serve any takedown notices, Charlie says the community of sharers reacted. They said “C’mon now. Here we have a publisher doing what...