The Lonesome Road

I was trawling the web yesterday when I came across this site [baen.com]. Now these guys have a policy that any author whose work is published by Baen, has an option to put up any of his/her books on the site for as long as (s)he wants to.

The librarian of the site - Eric Flint (who also has a set of his books available for free) makes very logical reasons why this won’t hurt anyone. These two are my favorites :

a) Word of mouth is an extremely effective form of marketing. Very true. There are plenty of books I have bought simply because of this. Case in point - The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King. I was lent book 1 by a friend - and now I own Books 1-5.

b) Computers cannot write fiction. No matter what, fiction is the production of a human brain. Distribustion of e-books does not threaten an author simple because he’s the one creating the fiction - only the medium of distribution is evolving.

This makes a lot of sense. Bibliophiles collect books - I know it’s a obvious statement, but one that seems to have escaped notice. If I do read a book online and like it, the chances are very high that I *will* buy it. And to be very honest - though I read e-books, nothing beats haveing the book in your hand, relaxing in a chair and being lost to the world around.

More power to the guys at baen!