TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Baen Books’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Baen author Dave Freer and his family are emigrating from South Africa to Australia. However, they have run into a slight problem: shifts in the exchange rate have decimated the funds they had budgeted for paying for the necessary quarantine of their pets.

So Freer is putting out the Storyteller’s Bowl (which TeleRead previously discussed here), and serializing his latest novel, Save the Dragons, in return for donations. He has posted the first chapter free. For each $400 he receives in donations, he will post a new chapter, until all 25 chapters + epilogue have been posted.

As with the Sharon Lee & Steve Miller Fledgling and Saltation projects, those who donate more than $25 in total will get a signed copy of the hardcover (or next most expensive format if the book does not come out in hardcover) when the book is actually published.

So, go Save the Dragons. You’ll also be saving Dave Freer’s family pets.

By Chris Meadows

Found via SFSignal.com (and Tor.com also has a piece on it): The on-line e-magazine Jim Baen’s Universe will be closing its doors next year. The April, 2010 issue will be the magazine’s last.

Editor Eric Flint writes:

In a nutshell, we were simply never able to get and retain enough subscribers to put us on a sales plateau that would allow us to continue publishing. From the beginning, we were too dependent on the income from the Universe club. The Club’s purpose was to provide the magazine with a much-needed initial surge of income—which it did indeed provide—and then, after the first year, to continue as an important but subsidiary source of income. Instead, the Club wound up being the source of about half of our annual income, from beginning to end.

Once those critically important subscribers began dropping out, Flint explains, that was the beginning of the end.

It is really sad to see Jim Baen’s Universe go under. From the outset, it paid top dollar for stories, and provided new writers with space reserved to make a name for themselves. I never got around to submitting a story to them for consideration while I had the chance. Now it’s too late.

By Chris Meadows

Found via Twitter from @Hadrien: the Conversational Reading blog remarks on a Publishers Weekly article confirming that Amazon is, indeed, losing money on every $9.99 Kindle e-book that it sells.

As the articles point out, Amazon has to pay the same wholesale price to the publishers for e-books as for print editions of those books—more or less half of the print edition price. (So do other e-book vendors; this is why even Fictionwise must charge excessive rates for books from publishers such as Random House, though they do they best they can to bring the prices down with discounts.)

Amazon then can choose to sell it for however much Amazon wants: whether it comes out ahead on the deal is entirely up to it. Thus, Amazon sells it at below wholesale, as a “loss leader”—breaking even or losing money on the deal to promote sales of the Kindle and grow its share of the market. (Giving away the blades to sell the razor, as it were.)

Thus, if a hardcover book has a suggested retail price of $24.95, Amazon pays the publisher about $12.50 for the e-book version—and loses about $2.50 when it turns around and sells it for $9.99. But Amazon doesn’t care: people look at those Kindle discounts and say, “Golly, that e-book gizmo would pay for itself in savings if I only bought a few dozen e-books.” And they buy the Kindle instead of some other reader.

This habit of Amazon’s of throwing its money away to build the Kindle market has publishers very worried. For one thing, it will get consumers used to paying $9.99 for e-books. (And indeed, there already is a movement afoot to “Boycott all [Kindle] books over $9.99!!”)

This is a strategy that could backfire on Amazon if they are unable to negotiate better rates with the publishers and eventually have to raise their prices. But it could also hurt the publishers as consumers put pressure on them to lower their prices so e-books are $9.99 everywhere.

What’s more, if Amazon corners the e-book market, it will become the “Wal-Mart of e-books”—able to dictate terms to its suppliers, and cut the suppliers off from the majority of customers if they refuse. Which will mean publishers will earn less money, and could mean authors earn less money, too.

(more…)

By Chris Meadows

According to posts in his group on the Baen Bar, author and columnist Eric Flint had heart bypass surgery on Thursday, and is currently recovering in the hospital. Baen editor Toni Weisskopf reports “We’ve heard from Eric via the grapevine and he’s doing very well.”

It wasn’t so long ago that our own David Rothman had his own heart bypass surgery. We at TeleRead extend our very best wishes to Mr. Flint for a speedy convalescence.

By Paul Biba

This is from the Kindle 2 Review (at least I think that’s the name of the blog, the owner’s nomenclature is awfully confusing):

With the first book in each of their Sci-Fi series Baen includes a CD that has all the books in the series.

Originally the idea must have been to encourage users to take a look at one or two books and get them to buy the others – since no reasonable person would attempt to read through a whole series on their computer screens or on their pdas.

Since we now have Kindles and the books are available in Mobi format, it means any Kindle owner basically has access to ALL Baen Books in ALL of these Series – and for Free.

It’s not a ‘try out the first Temeraire novel and then if you like it buy the rest’. Its every single book in the series available in .mobi format. And lots and lots of series.

As the author of the post points out, this is not “ripping Baen off”, as Baen is well aware of this and sanctions the practice.

By Paul Biba

Alerted by a correspondent I went over to Baen Books and checked out their free ebooks. I haven’t done this in a while, and he was indeed correct that all of their free ebooks are now available in “ePub/Stanza” format. I don’t know about the format of their Webscriptions, however, as I can’t get to the download page. The use of the Stanza name is interesting. Does this mean that we’ll see a Stanza catalog coming from Baen soon?

Our correspondent, Jim Lester also had this interesting tidbit to impart: they are using Calibre to convert the books. Here’s what Jim says:

For them using Calibre, you can verify this by looking in metadata.opf of the ePub files, I’ve only done a small sampling of the books I’ve downloaded, but the metadata section includes several elements and attributes that are indicitave of them using Calibre for the conversion, with the most obvious being:
calibre (0.5.4) [http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net]