Free Books!
Mar. 16th, 2003 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eBaen Books http://www.baen.com
I have thousands of books and magazines. It makes it hell to move house. At the moment most of them are still packed in boxes. I am expecting to move again in another year or so and am naturally reluctant to do the old weeks-long repacking chore.
I had been thinking back to some of the stories I enjoyed in my youth. Of those, I'm particularly nostalgic about the Retief series by Keith Laumer. I have most of the stories he wrote, both in magazines and in collected works, but they are packed away. I have been hankering to read them again but am loath to unpack hundreds of books just to find a dozen.
In recent months I have become quite a fan of the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. I have been building up a large collection of electronic books. Mostly these are books I already own on paper, though there are some I haven't yet bought. I had always thought I would have to scan and OCR my zillions of pages of literature. I hadn't in my wildest dreams thought that a sharing network would make it so easy for me to relinquish paper for electrons.
My cool little PalmVx is my preferred medium for reading these days. If I have a choice between reading something on paper or my desktop screen or my Palm, I will unhesitatingly choose the Palm. So I have lately been rereading a lot of my old favorites while my books are still packed in boxes. This is wonderful!
But my original reason for posting this here was that Baen Books http://www.baen.com have seen the light in a way that many companies refuse to. They have placed some of their older books online, freely downloadable. I was astonished to find that among them are the Retief stories I have been wanting to read again. Yay! I downloaded them and have been happily immersed in stories from my childhood. While I was about it I downloaded some stories by Mercedes Lackey, about whom I have heard good words but haven't read. Money is very thin for me at the moment so there is zero chance of reading anything by an author I don't know. I shall be reading her free stuff and using that to decide whether to buy some of her wares.
That last statement is why it is such a smart move by Baen Books. It seems I am not the only one who thinks like that. Every time they publish an old book online for free, sales of currently in-print books by that author resurge. Everybody wins.
I have thousands of books and magazines. It makes it hell to move house. At the moment most of them are still packed in boxes. I am expecting to move again in another year or so and am naturally reluctant to do the old weeks-long repacking chore.
I had been thinking back to some of the stories I enjoyed in my youth. Of those, I'm particularly nostalgic about the Retief series by Keith Laumer. I have most of the stories he wrote, both in magazines and in collected works, but they are packed away. I have been hankering to read them again but am loath to unpack hundreds of books just to find a dozen.
In recent months I have become quite a fan of the peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. I have been building up a large collection of electronic books. Mostly these are books I already own on paper, though there are some I haven't yet bought. I had always thought I would have to scan and OCR my zillions of pages of literature. I hadn't in my wildest dreams thought that a sharing network would make it so easy for me to relinquish paper for electrons.
My cool little PalmVx is my preferred medium for reading these days. If I have a choice between reading something on paper or my desktop screen or my Palm, I will unhesitatingly choose the Palm. So I have lately been rereading a lot of my old favorites while my books are still packed in boxes. This is wonderful!
But my original reason for posting this here was that Baen Books http://www.baen.com have seen the light in a way that many companies refuse to. They have placed some of their older books online, freely downloadable. I was astonished to find that among them are the Retief stories I have been wanting to read again. Yay! I downloaded them and have been happily immersed in stories from my childhood. While I was about it I downloaded some stories by Mercedes Lackey, about whom I have heard good words but haven't read. Money is very thin for me at the moment so there is zero chance of reading anything by an author I don't know. I shall be reading her free stuff and using that to decide whether to buy some of her wares.
That last statement is why it is such a smart move by Baen Books. It seems I am not the only one who thinks like that. Every time they publish an old book online for free, sales of currently in-print books by that author resurge. Everybody wins.
