Weisskopf has many interesting things to say about Baen’s overall strategy, pricing, and the question of e-books “cannibalizing” printed books. The interview begins below the jump. (Links added by me.)

Many voices in the publishing industry are proclaiming that, since printing costs are only a couple of dollars out of a hardcover’s total price, selling e-books at a price point of $9.99 is "unsustainable." But Baen has been selling e-books for less than that for over ten years, even of books released in hardcover, and has become the counterexample that everybody holds up in response to other publishers’ claims about printing costs.

TW: Well, part of the “secret” there is that we don’t pay for expensive DRM (“digital rights management”) schemes. I’ve never understood why we should add to our costs with the sole outcome that it’s harder for readers to buy and read the books we want to sell. On the contrary, I want to make it as easy as possible for my readers to find, purchase and read my books. That goal influences every publishing decision I make from our marketing to what typefaces we use.

How is Baen able to sustain selling e-books at such low prices? Is it simply that Baen considers them mainly another form of promotion for the print books (as suggested here), and so does not assign the same share of manuscript production fixed costs (editing, typesetting, etc.) to e-books that other publishers do?

TW: Certainly when we started we viewed the ebooks as an experiment. In some ways mass market paperbacks are also a “form of promotion” for future hardcovers. Indeed, many pbs from the big publishers will run excerpts of the next hc from the author. The ebook just extends that idea. So yes, it’s a form of promotion. Is it also a source of income & profit? Absolutely.

Are you able to discuss the royalty rates Baen pays on e-books, in terms of percentage of "cover price"? How do they compare to print royalty figures?

TW: We pay approximately double hardcover royalties [in terms of percentage of cover price] for the ebooks.

Is it likely that inexpensive e-books will "cannibalize" print book sales—either now, or at some time in the future?

TW: I don’t think any sales “cannibalize” any other sales. Does a used book sale cannibalize a new book sale? Not at all. In general, people buy the nicest version of a book they can at the time. Can a used book sale or a library loan introduce my author, my series, my brand to a new reader, who may then be enthralled, entranced, ensorcelled into buying the next new hardcover in the series (and the eARC, and the final ebook, and maybe the pb too, so she can lend it out)—heck, yes. My goal is to make more readers for my brand. ANY sale has the potential to do that.

Specifically, I think ebooks will extend the market for books, not reduce it. But then what I am selling is good stories; I don’t care what medium I sell those stories in. If my readers tell me they want it chipped on stone, I will find some way to do that. If they want me to beam the story directly to a chip in the brain, I will do that.

Baen has pioneered a number of interesting techniques for using e-books promotionally: the free library, the webscription bundles, the pack-in CDs. Are any new promotional ideas on the horizon?

TW: We are printing codes in some hardcovers for free ebooks earlier in the same series. But for the time being, nothing radical planned. We’ll wait for the technology for flash drives to get even cheaper and flatter and who knows. Maybe we’ll be able to print drives directly into the books. You tell me! This is the sort of thing I rely on my cutting-edge techie Barflies to tell me about. Maybe your readers have suggestions for me? What would they like to see?

Some people have complained that Baen’s habit of treating e-books mainly as promotional material for selling printed books hurts the perception of e-books as having value in and of themselves, and encourages other publishers to misunderstand and perhaps misuse e-books in that way. (They might point to Tor.com’s free e-book promotion which left a number of e-book readers more disgruntled than pleased as an example of this sort of misunderstanding.) Is this a likely scenario?

TW: I can’t control what other publishers do and how they experiment! It’s not like what we do is a secret formula. Though perhaps we should call it that and sell the secret slowly over the course of a year in seminars…. We can only do what we do. But there are plenty of people over at Tor who value ebooks and want to see it done right.

In the last couple of years, since the introduction of the Kindle, we have seen the first signs that the nascent e-book market is actually starting to take off. At the moment, e-books make up a fairly small percentage of the overall book market—less than 5%. What will happen when and if e-books become a significantly larger fraction of the market? Will Baen have to revise its e-book pricing structure?

TW: When the ebook market takes off, we’ll sell more books. A lot of these questions seem to be leading to: is Baen going to raise ebook prices? We don’t have any plans to now, but I won’t rule it out for the future. Part of being small and nimble is the ability to change quickly as circumstances change. It may well be that Baen books sold through third parties will be more expensive than those we sell directly—that’s the function of paying the middleman and the price you pay to extend your reach. But we don’t dictate prices to other retailers, and we won’t to them. I’m certainly willing to try different things. If somebody finds a way to do it better, we’ll adjust.

Recently, Baen "rescued" two e-book series, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller’s Liaden stories and P.C. Hodgell’s Chronicles of the Kencyrath, after their prior publishers Meisha Merlin (for print) and Embiid (for e-books) went under. What led to the decision to take these books on? Was Lee & Miller’s successful "Storyteller’s Bowl" experiment with Fledgling and Saltation a factor?

TW: We had an editor who was a big Liaden fan, and a freelance editor who had recommended Hodgell to me, so I was aware of those authors in a general way. Also, there was a lot of call for the books from our on-line forum, Baen’s Bar. The Barflies thought the Liaden series would make a good fit for our line. I take that sort of input very seriously. And before they ceased operating we’d been in negotiations with Meisha Merlin to distribute their ebooks, so we were already prepared to take on the Hodgell and Lee and Miller anyway. Hodgell was getting ready to write a new book in the Kencyrath series right about then. It seemed like all the forces of the universe were conspiring to give us the opportunity.

Regarding the success of the “story bowl” early publication of Fledgling andSaltation: yes, it was another proof of principle. We knew the authors had their own strong on-line community, there was already support and good word-of-mouth report on the books, and that wasn’t going to hurt our efforts, but supplement them. The obvious follow-on question is “why not do it again?” And the answer is that it takes a lot of effort on the authors’ part to make that model work, and these authors would rather spend that time writing the next book. Most authors do—but not all. You’ll see this model of publishing more, I think, in the future. BUT—it’s very hard to build an audience if you don’t have the reach of a mass market publisher. Not impossible, but hard. It takes a particular kind of personality to enjoy doing that in addition to enjoying writing fiction that a mass market will want to read—and have the professional skills to do both well.

These series were first reprinted as e-book-only omnibus titles before being re-issued as print omnibuses (although it seems the existing Liaden books were reprinted through Ace rather than Baen) with new sequels commissioned. Were the e-book sales of those titles a factor in the decision to commission new books?

TW: Heck yes! It was invaluable marketing research. And we made money for the authors and ourselves doing it. Win all around.

Toni concluded:

TW: I’m not saying that what we do will work for everyone else. They want to try it, that’s their lookout, and the beauty of a free market. But some contributing factors: because we are an independent publishing house (distributed by publishing giant Simon & Schuster), our overhead costs are probably lower than the big guys. Another factor is that our business model is that of the midlist publisher. Yes, we have several New York Times bestsellers a year. But we don’t expect those books to finance all the rest. All our books are expected to pull their weight, and we rely a great deal on our backlist, the long chain of earlier books in series and so on, to act as a profit center. Put another way, we are betting smaller, so our potential losses are smaller, but the upside is smaller, too. But it is a sustainable way of betting. At least so far!

I refer people to Eric Flint’s “Prime Palaver” at the Baen Free Library for an exhaustive discussion of the issues. In a nutshell, the problem of the midlist author or publisher is not piracy, but lack of exposure. If you like alternate history but don’t know about the 1632 series you can’t buy the books from Baen. So I want to spread the word by any means possible, I want to reach as many readers as possible. So we post extensive partial samples of books, we post partial samples of series (i.e. entire novels) at the Baen Free Library, we distribute CDs with tons of free books in selected hardcovers a couple times a year, we send out review copies to reviewers and booksellers. I hand out free books at conventions.

I have faith in my product: if you read it, you will like it and want more. And if you find you don’t like what I do, I’ve still not alienated a reader who’s been forced to pay for something they don’t like. Plenty of people who like Mercedes Lackey won’t go for Tom Kratman and I publish them both (which means, btw, that I do enjoy them both). This way the reader is more likely to try something new from Baen again—and if I don’t get you with one author or title, maybe I’ll get you on the next one.

The other side of the coin is that Jim Baen didn’t believe our readers are thieves and neither do I. I believe they will buy the book when they have the money. And I don’t believe our readers are ignorant. The understand TANSTAAFL. Our readers understand that we can’t continue to find great books and the authors continue to write them if we don’t get paid. So we don’t treat our readers badly by trying to micromanage the use of the ebooks, and we have been amply rewarded for that trust.

Thanks to Toni Weisskopf for participating in this interview!

He mentions a line of extremely inexpensive paperbacks that Penguin has been publishing in Australia at the “low” price of AU$9.95 (or about US$9.05) to celebrate its 75th anniversary. (I guess paperbacks must normally be much more expensive over there, given that’s a couple of dollars more than many regularly-priced ones go for over here.)

Many of these books are available as e-books in the public domain, for free, but Penguin has still managed to sell over 250,000 copies of those paperbacks in the first three months. Of course, anyone who has followed Baen for long is familiar with the idea that free e-books promote sales of printed copies, so that may be what has happened here.

Regardless, it certainly shows that paper books are not out of the sales running yet—even reprints of old ones.

Imagine if buying the Kindle version of an e-book bought you the eReader version, too for one price—and Mobipocket, EPUB, and PDF versions as well. Baen does something like this, of course—when you buy a Webscription e-book, you get it in all formats they offer, and can redownload it whenever you need to—and Fictionwise does the same thing for its DRM-free “multiformat” books.

But as Steve Pendergrast has said, publishers regard each e-book format as a separate “edition”—so if you buy a DRM-locked title from Fictionwise, you must choose which format you want at time of purchase—and if you buy a Mobipocket book but later decide you need it in eReader, your only choice is to buy it again.

This “Tower of e-Babel” makes it terribly difficult to future-proof your purchases. If the next reader you buy does not read the format of your existing library, your only option is generally to crack the DRM and convert your library to a new format.

Of course, Amazon and other big companies are banking on this, trying to lock customers into their own formats so they have less choice when it comes time to upgrade. This is one of several factors that may be holding the e-book market back.

The sooner publishers get a clue and start letting us buy the book in a way that will let us use it in all devices we own, the better. At least Valve is going to let us do that for its games.

Bova writes that his premise in Cyberbooks was that “electrons are cheaper than paper.”

Ninety percent of a book publisher’s expenses are the cost of hauling paper across the countryside: from paper mill to printing plant, from printing plant to book distributors’ warehouses, from warehouses to book stores.

I figured that a book published electronically could go directly from the publisher’s office to the retail buyer, via the Internet. Publishers could save enormous expenses.

He goes on to talk about how e-books are now with us, but that just like in his satire, things are starting to go “drastically wrong.” Apart from people feeling uncomfortable reading on a screen (to which Bova. a long-time e-book enthusiast even apart from Cyberbooks, has a classic retort), he brings up the Amazon/Macmillan price feud:

Amazon wanted to price the books it offers on Kindle so low that they could corner the market on electronic books. Macmillan countered that they couldn’t make a profit on books sold at such low prices.

He then gets the order of events wrong when he says that it was Apple’s introduction of the new iPad that got Amazon and Macmillan to come to an agreement. In fact, it was the introduction of the iPad, and Apple’s agency pricing model, that kicked off the dispute to begin with when Macmillan decided they liked the idea and wanted Amazon to use it too.

Finally, Bova wonders whether, since the production costs are so much lower for e-books, authors should get a bigger share of the royalties than in the past. (In fact, Macmillan’s John Sargent has said that Macmillan will be looking at increasing the e-book royalty percentage to authors under the agency model.)

Amazon vs. Macmillan Redux

It’s interesting to consider the ways that “TeleReading” has changed things even in the lifetime of one author. And not even just the e-book aspect. Back when Bova wrote Cyberbooks in 1989, he probably could not have imagined that one day an editorial he wrote for a local paper might be read and discussed by people all over the world.

It’s funny that the Bova, whose work predicted the modern e-book market in a number of ways, still has a few misconceptions about the e-book industry. For starters, does he not see any irony in the fact that he starts out talking about how e-books should be a lot cheaper because they cost so much less to produce (a fact which many in the publishing industry would and do dispute) and then goes on to complain about Amazon selling e-books too cheaply for publishers to make a profit?

But I have to disagree slightly with Nate the Great’s response, too:

Um, no. Macmillan was making a profit on the ebooks.  And I would argue that you are wrong about Amazon’s motive. They’re not trying to corner the market (which is impossible to do on the internet); they’re selling ebooks at the price that people want to pay.

I’d remind him that Macmillan was making a profit on them only because Amazon was selling a lot of them at a loss. They weren’t going to go on doing that forever, “price people want to pay” or not. And if they couldn’t “corner” the market, they could at least grab up a Microsoftian chunk of it.

Sooner or later, the publishers feared, Amazon might present them with an ultimatum: lower their wholesale prices to where Amazon could sell at a profit, or stop selling e-books. Of course, that’s all academic now.

Printing Costs vs. E-book Price

And publishers will tell you that e-books actually don’t cost that much less to produce, and that printing costs certainly aren’t “ninety percent” of them. If the publishers are to be believed, the printing costs for a hardcover are pegged at only a couple of dollars per unit, which leaves over $20 of price unaffected.

Hardcovers cost so much not necessarily because of printing costs, but because they’re the publishers’ first crack at getting a large chunk of the other production costs (editing, typesetting, advance, etc.) paid off—and because they are targeted at the crazy people who want to own their favorite author’s new book right away and damn the financial cost.

It is true that Baen sells its e-books at $6 each, but Baen’s execs seem to view e-books as a promotional side-project and apparently do not assign them a proportional tranche of the manuscript’s non-printing-related costs—so Baen can sell them cheaper without fear of cannibalizing its printed book sales.

(And even Baen sells a more expensive and less proofed $15 “E-ARC” version for people who just can’t wait—just like hardcovers are priced higher for people who “just can’t wait” for paperback.)

That’s quite a difference in philosophy from other publishers, and it is uncertain whether Baen will be able to keep it up when e-books are 50% or even 25% of the book market rather than 5% or less as they are now.

It is an interesting time for the e-book industry, and the future is still too hard to predict. But consumers are making it clear that they share Bova’s point of view that e-books should be less expensive, and how the publishers respond to sales figures from their new agency pricing model might make a considerable difference in how quickly the e-book market grows.

Maybe it’s time for a sequel to Cyberbooks.

Previously we mentioned

Interestingly, one of the cases where there was not a correlation—and sales actually went down—was in the case of the free e-books Tor.com offered temporarily to promote the new blog, and only to people signed up for their newsletter.

Why were the results from Tor so different from the others? This question cannot be answered with certainty. The only thing we know is that Tor’s model of making the books available for one week only and requiring registration in order to download the book was substantially different from the models used to create free versions of the other books we studied.

Owens spoke to John Hilton, one of the study’s authors, about the study. Hilton pointed out that even if sales of those specific titles did not benefit, they may have had other benefits that were not measured by the study—signing more people up for the newsletter and bringing them to Tor.com, for example.

But of course, things could change with the release of the iPad and other next-generation e-book readers that follow. Owens notes:

Those who have advocated free ebooks sometimes argue that people inherently don’t like reading longer works on a screen, so they would sometimes buy a print title after sampling it online. But this new generation of e-readers are designed to be read just like dead-tree books, adding a new dynamic to the mix. If ebooks themselves become a valuable commodity, why give them away for free?

Though there are other beneficial factors apart from just sales, of course. Building up name-recognition, for example. Cory Doctorow’s free e-books basically took Doctorow from being just a well-known blogger to being a well-known SF author too.

Hilton would like to perform the study again, with more titles over a longer period of time, and access to more information such as how many people downloaded a given book. However, publishers are leery of both giving books away for free and giving out those kinds of figures. (Perhaps they should talk to Baen.)

I think it’s great to have this kind of systematic study out there. While it is still fairly small, it at least gets away from the realm of “anecdotal” evidence by comparing books in a number of genres and from a number of sources.

If this were a few years ago, I would probably be worried that this would reinforce the false impression that e-books only have value as promotional gimmicks, not in and of themselves—a charge that has sometimes been leveled against Baen for its promotional use of them, and against Tor for its temporary, limited giveaway of them.

But since the Kindle has proven beyond a doubt that there are plenty of consumers out there willing to buy e-books, too, that might not be such a worry anymore.

All the same, I hope publishers will pay attention to this study and start testing the waters with more free e-book releases of their own. Wouldn’t it be something if, rather than fearing e-books might cannibalize print sales, they started using them to boost them instead?

Though, again, nobody knows what the next few years will bring. It’s just vaguely possible that we might finally start to reach the tipping point where e-books start to become a good enough substitute that having the e-book means you might not need to buy the paper book. What will become of free e-books then?

In his Kindle Nation Daily blog, Stephen Windwalker praises Sargent for at last addressing the general public rather than just the industry insiders at whom his earlier entries were pitched—even as he remains critical of Sargent’s message.

I had been critical of Sargent previously for addressing his earlier comments only to authors and literary agents, and consequently trying to position them to speak up on his and his company’s behalf, and this new post is well worth reading. He has not changed my mind, and I doubt he will change the minds of many ebook readers, but we will see. There are dozens of comments that give a good sense of the range of views generally in the ebook pricing controversy, and you may want to add your voice to those of other readers.

Over on GigaOm, Matthew Ingram casts Sargent’s post as an attempt to protect the print publishing model from e-books’ disruption. As an example, he holds up Sargent’s statement that the agency model will allow them to publish e-books simultaneously with the release of the print books, thus “[solving] the problem” of windowing.

Here’s the thing: This “problem,” as Sargent calls it, has been wholly created by publishers like Macmillan, who hold back the release of e-books in order to try and milk traditional hardcover and paperback sales for as long as they can. So now, in response to Amazon and others acceding to their demands on price, Macmillan is going to be good enough to stop doing that. This is the retailing equivalent of the serial killer who scrawls “Stop me before I kill again” on a mirror in lipstick. Could not the publishers themselves have stopped this practice at any time and avoided frustrating readers?

He further points out (as Windwalker did in a later portion of his own blog) that comparing $12-$15 e-books with $24-$28 hardcovers ignores the fact that those hardcovers are frequently discounted considerably when they aren’t moving, or by on-line retailers such as Amazon. A $15 e-book vs. a $25 hardcover is one thing, but what about a $15 e-book vs. a $15 hardcover?

Mike Masnick of TechDirt links to and agrees with Ingram’s post, and adds that Sargent’s segmentation of e-books into hardcover and paperback prices seems to show Sargent’s misunderstanding of market forces.

One of the reasons why economic forces work the way that they do, and the reason why infinite goods with zero marginal cost get pushed in price towards zero, is that buyers implicitly understand the difference between scarce goods and abundant goods. They implicitly recognize the marginal cost of making another good, and they mentally price products accordingly. Pretending that consumers don’t do that is assuming that consumers are stupid. And that’s an even bigger mistake than looking backwards instead of forward.

A Premium on Impatience

There’s just one place where I feel these blog posts are missing the point slightly.

The point of hardcover vs. paperback pricing is not to scale to the expense of production costs. It never has been. Hardcovers only cost a buck or so more per unit to manufacture than paperbacks. But they sell for three times as much. Why is that?

Partly it’s the perception of sturdier construction—reading a hardcover does not cause as much wear on the book as reading a paperback. But largely it’s the impatience factor. In the days before e-books, someone would buy a hardcover instead of waiting for a paperback because he wants to read that book right away. And he pays a premium for that impatience.

E-ARCs: Baen’s Hardcover E-books

It’s the same with Baen’s E-ARCs, the electronic advance copies of a book that Baen sells for $15 for several months prior to publishing the “fully-proofed” e-book version for $6. Nobody accuses Baen of price-gouging on electrons, right?

Well, all right, I have said in the past that E-ARCs were largely a waste of money: why pay two and a half times the cost to buy an unproofed e-book? But a lot of people buy them because not having to wait three more months to read the whole book is worth $15 to them.

I swore I would never buy an E-ARC, and stuck to it—until P.C. Hodgell’s latest Kencyr book, Bound in Blood came out, and like a fool I read the sample chapters. Suddenly, I had to know what happened next, and shortly afterward that E-ARC was mine. It’s a little embarrassing…but in my defense, it was a P.C. Hodgell book!

What’s Sauce for the Goose…

So yes, that is why hardcovers cost so much more to buy when they cost so little more to print: it’s a premium on impatience, and the greater revenue the hardcover version brings in lets the book earn out its fixed costs so that the paperback being cheaper doesn’t hurt so much.

I don’t see why publishers shouldn’t be able to charge the same impatience premium for e-books, if they can be trusted to reduce the price commensurately at the same time they bring out the paperback.

Some e-book fans may have a hard time understanding that time should be a factor, but the average person Ficbot spoke to on the bus didn’t see any problem with it. I suspect a lot of other consumers will feel the same way. If they don’t, then the publishing companies will figure out they need to lower their prices. Either way, as Mike Masnick says, the market will decide.

Cyberbooks was published as part of the Ben Bova anthology Laugh Lines, available in the November 2009 Webscriptions month for $15, or by itself for $6.

The book is a brilliant, scathing satire of the publishing industry (in fact, I’m a bit surprised that the original publisher had enough of a sense of humor about itself to print it) that any lover of print or e-books should read.

TeleRead contributor Amos Bokros reviewed Cyberbooks in 2002. In 2006, author Ben Bova expressed excitement about the forthcoming Sony Reader.

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

The agency model would allow Amazon to make more money selling our books, not less. We would make less money in our dealings with Amazon under the new model. Our disagreement is not about short-term profitability but rather about the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market.

Of course, Amazon knows that consumers are reluctant to pay over $9.99—and wants to keep that low price advantage to better compete with the iPad.

“Perceived High Prices”

There is no better illustration of this than the way authors who dare to complain about Amazon’s behavior or support Macmillan’s pricing position are, rightly or wrongly, being attacked in comments on their blog posts or forum discussions as cheap bastards. (Examples: John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, Jeffrey A. Carver.) Of course, given that their livelihoods are on the line, it is entirely understandable they would be worried.

Ironically, just a few days ago Paul Biba reported from Digital Book World that Macmillan President Brian Napack said (emphasis mine):

Piracy happens when motivation meets opportunity. Motivation: love of authors, genres; perceived high prices; lack of availability; restrictive formats; distain for media companies. Opportunity: more digital content; more file sharing sites, broad availability of titles, more pirate ready devices.

So what’s Macmillan’s solution to those “perceived high prices”? Raise them! (And I don’t see them doing anything about “restrictive formats”, such as asking Amazon to leave off DRM, come to think of it.)

Resale Price Maintenance

Personally, I tend to get a little suspicious when I hear about the CEO of a company wanting to “make less money” so someone else can “make more money” in the name of altruistically looking after the viability of the market.

Corporations don’t exist for the purpose of ensuring market viability, they exist to make a profit. If a CEO is talking about intentionally making less money, something does not add up. Anyway, shouldn’t Amazon be free to decide how much money it wants to make, or even if it wants to give it away?

What it really means is that Macmillan wants to jump ship to Apple’s pricier model and doesn’t want Amazon (or, for that matter, any other merchant) undercutting it.

When you get right down to it, I have a pretty big problem with a supplier being able to control retail prices. That’s called resale price maintenance, and it’s anti-competitive behavior.

If Amazon (or Barnes & Noble) wants to sell books at below wholesale as loss leaders to promote the sale of its Kindle (or Nook), that is their decision to make. It is up to Macmillan to either enable them to do that or not, by selling them or not selling them the e-books as the case may be.

Macmillan should only be able to decide what it charges for a book, and whether or not it will sell those books to a given retailer. It is free to attempt to set terms, but conversely the retailer is free to reject those terms—as Amazon is doing.

And the retailer is free to decide not to carry any of the wholesaler’s goods at all, just as you or I might decide to boycott a store that did something we don’t like. It might come off looking like a great big jerk (as it does in this case), but it’s a free country and a free market; that retailer has every right to do so.

If the retailer in question were a small shop such as Fictionwise or BooksOnBoard, this would hardly even be a story. But since the retailer is Amazon, the 800 lb gorilla of the book marketing industry, and their snit-fit might cut into Macmillan’s (and its authors’) bottom line, it’s suddenly a great big deal.

Are Publishers Greedy Bastards?

If Amazon looks like a jerk, the publishers are not looking much better. They continue to set e-book prices at or near the price of hardcover books, and often fail to bring them down for years afterward even when the books are being sold in paperback. And readers have historically not been happy about it, and muttered about all publishers being greedy bastards. It took Amazon’s decision to start selling e-books at $9.99 as loss-leaders to push its e-book reader to start to change that.

Why should publishers be considered greedy bastards? Because Baen, the only major exception, has been selling its e-books DRM-free at (mostly) $6 or less for over ten years now, and not only has it not harmed its print book business, it has made a profit on the e-book side as well. Baen’s $6 e-books are not loss leaders but profit-makers.

Why on earth is none of the other publishers able to do that? It’s not as if Baen relies on economy of scale; they’re much smaller than any of the other publishers we’re talking about. Instead, the publishers continue to insist that physical printing and distribution costs are the smallest fractional cost of book production, and e-books have to be sold at hardcover prices or they will lose money.

Yeah, right. Tell that to Baen.

I don’t know what Baen is doing that these other houses are not, but it seems like those other houses could do a lot worse than to learn from Baen’s experience at making cheap, DRM-free e-books turn a profit. Consumers do love their cheap and DRM-free e-books.

The Least Worst Alternative

I don’t think Amazon is any kind of a “good guy” here either, though. Let’s not delude ourselves that they’re fighting for low prices, consumer rights, Mom, and apple pie. As Cory Doctorow points out, they have restrictive (albeit removable) DRM, and ridiculous licensing terms on their e-books that they will not abrogate even when the publisher wants them to.

I like the idea of lower-priced e-books, but I also like the idea of DRM-free ones. I personally haven’t bought any Kindle books yet, and don’t know if I ever will buy any, though I have downloaded some free titles.

In the end, I don’t much like either side’s position, but I dislike Amazon’s slightly less. Again, I do not think that retail prices should ever be entirely controlled by a wholesaler. That is bad for the consumer. If Macmillan wants to control prices, let them set up their own e-book retail system as Baen did and control those prices.

Defendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions).

However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about the site itself, and his own attitudes toward e-books. The complete interview text starts below the jump.

How did the idea for Tor.Com come about?

I wasn’t involved in Tor.com back then, but as I understand it, the seed of the idea came about from a conversation between (Tor Books Art Director) Irene Gallo, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor Books Senior Editor) and my current boss, Fritz Foy (VP of Strategic Technology for Macmillan), who is also a lifelong SF fan—‘one of us’ in every sense of the word. They asked Tom Doherty for his blessing, and permission to use the Tor brand, but wisely kept the site separate from the daily workings of Tor Books.

Fritz is a very smart and forward-looking guy (and I’m not just saying that because he’s the guy who’s in charge of giving me a raise!), Irene, Patrick, and Teresa are all well-known bloggers and quite familiar with the way the social internet works, so they had a very clear idea of what they wanted—and didn’t want—the site to be.

How long was the site in the planning stages?

Once again, I wasn’t around back then (I was then the low man on the totem pole in Tor Books’ art department at the time), but I think around 18 months, give or take.

Is there anything that you would do differently given the experience you’ve had?

I can’t say that there is anything that we’d do differently, really. Even the things that have not worked out have given us lots of insight into how we as publishers can approach the online space, and we’ve been able to build on the mistakes in order to try to set things right, or approach the same problem differently the next go-round.

One of the things I’m trying to push for this year is to specifically address some of those things, but mostly they falls under the realm of nitty-gritty development stuff: which tools we should or should not be using, what systems are we not taking advantage of that we should, etc. Lots of behind-the-scenes stuff.

The free e-book giveaway at Tor.com’s launch was meant to serve as a promotion for the site, and for the dead-tree forms of various Tor series whose first books Tor gave away electronically.

However, many e-book fans assumed they were promoting the launch of Tor’s e-book store and were upset when later books were not available electronically. This led to a fairly vociferous backlash in several Tor.com comment threads. (Which, in the interest of full disclosure, I will admit to participating in. Mea culpa.)

Have you learned anything from this experience? What would you change if you had the giveaway to do over again?

This was a big, big thing for me, since it was the first time I was exposed as a public face associated with Tor.com, and, being an ebook consumer, I understood where many people were coming from.

First and foremost, we never realized that the teaser campaign for Tor.com would be construed as a teaser for an ebook store specifically—the thought really never occurred to us. In hindsight, it’s totally understandable that it would have been seen that way, but it was a classic case of being too close to the project; everyone was pretty blindsided by that attitude.

Additionally, the big, big lesson we learned from the promotion was to not offer a first book in a series for download if the subsequent books aren’t available as ebooks. Since then, we’ve always kept that in mind when doing ebook promotions. Due to the vagaries of rights, availability, and corporate policies, we’re not always able to make everything we want available, but we do try to not make that same mistake.

We listened, and we learned, but the one thing that did strike a lot of us was the sense of entitlement out there among ebook aficionados. While on the one hand, as an ebook fan myself, I understand (and more often than not, sympathize with) the gripes being aired, I was really put off by how some people’s concerns were being expressed: there’s a lack of understanding of how the publishing industry works (or doesn’t work, but that’s another conversation), and an unwillingness to take anything that the big six publishers say at face-value. I suppose that it’s understandable, given previous experiences with the music industry, but it really led to a toxic atmosphere, in which we felt put on the defensive very quickly. This was actually my first exposure to this kind of entitled, evangelical, all-or-nothing thinking with regards to ebooks, and it’s something which I, along with others, have addressed elsewhere.

Can you talk about the history behind Tor’s attempts to offer e-books, such as the early "Tor Webscriptions" project?

I should make a distinction here (which will probably apply further down the interview): Tor.com is run separately from Tor Books, and as such, I’m neither privy to, or necessarily in alignment with Tor Books’ policies or party lines. In other words, if you want to ask about Tor Books’ attitudes and policies with regards to ebooks, you’ll have to ask them—all I can offer you are my personal opinions, which have very little bearing on how Tor Books runs its e-ship.

Now, as I understand it, at one point, Tor Books had a deal with Baen to sell ebooks via their Webscription service (which, as you know, is actually something of a gold standard in customer experience among long-time—read: pre-Kindle—ebook enthusiasts); but some time before Tor.com launched, Tor books were pulled from Baen’s site—I don’t know why. Webscriptions sells ebooks without DRM, so it’s possible that that may have had something to do with it, but this may be completely inaccurate. I’ve done some light digging around, but no one seems to be able to give me a solid reason as to the whys and wherefores of the Webscription story.

It seems as though Tor’s e-book store has been "just around the corner" literally ever since Tor.com launched. The last I had heard, the holdup was due to technical matters on Baen’s end. Can you give us an update on the current status of the store, and any specific details about what the store will be like when it comes out?

The Tor.com ebook store has absolutely nothing to do with Baen, never has, and probably never will, sadly (I’m a fan of Baen’s bookstore). The confluence of Baen and Tor.com’s stores is probably a result of the Tor Books/Baen relationship being so prominent in the ebook landscape, but that’s in the past, as far as I know.

(When I pointed out that there was a long-standing expectation that Tor was going to be coming back to Webscriptions with its books, as evinced by a 2007 blog post from Charlie Stross and subsequent comments on Baen’s Bar, Defendini reiterated that—as mentioned above—Tor.com’s e-book store is a completely new venture, unrelated to Tor Books’s prior e-book deals, and he was not privy to any aspects of those deals.)

The original plan as it pertains to Tor.com specifically was to roll out the ebook store at the same time as the print bookstore, and to make it publisher agnostic, just like the print store. That’s still the plan, but if you look at the mechanisms for buying and downloading ebooks from publishers’ websites,that’s pretty much what we were looking at implementing originally. Those ecommerce systems are cumbersome, incomplete, and frankly, not customer-centric at all. If you compare that customer experience to the customer experience on something like iTunes, Amazon, etc, you realize publishers have a very, very long ways to go in establishing a meaningful retail relationship with their end-users: actual readers.

This speaks to a larger issue, which is that publishing is a very insular industry, where insiders are constantly talking to each other, but very rarely do they actually venture out of the echo chamber in order to talk to or listen to the actual end customer: the reader. There have traditionally been some very valid arguments as for why this is the case, but as digital media democratizes the world more and more, those arguments become much less convincing or even relevant. A direct relationship with the reader traditionally has never been as important to legacy publishers as a relationship with the buyer for B&N, for example, although that’s slowly changing (I like to think that Tor.com is helping to change that, in a small way).

When we realized how a store using the current system would work (or wouldn’t), we decided to nix the ebook store for the time being, and find an alternative that would create a good customer experience. Unfortunately, we’ve been through a few iterations, and so far, we haven’t been able to get it right for various reasons: using the wrong infrastructure, convoluted and outdated IT, conflicts with regard to existing corporate business-to-business relationships, DRM issues, etc. So no-go on the ebook store yet. We are still working on a solution, but the road has been much more slow-going that I would have expected at the outset. As an ebook consumer myself, it’s really important to me that we get it right, that we don’t screw anyone over, and that we make an ebook store as accessible and as easy to use as possible. Once we have that, we’ll take it live. Before that: not gonna happen, if I have anything to say about it (which, of course, isn’t always the case). In the meantime, I enjoy (or cringe in embarrassment, depending on my mood) whenever I get made fun of on fora with regards to my "soon" statements.

It has been hoped (or assumed) by many e-book fans that Tor’s store will follow the same model used by Baen—DRM-free e-books priced at or below paperback level. But the Tor e-books currently sold on Fictionwise are still priced at or around hardcover level, with DRM intact, even though Fictionwise prefers to sell books in DRM-free, less expensive multi-format for publishers who will allow it. Does this mean people who hope for a more Baen-like Tor store will be disappointed?

I certainly hope not. I’m no fan of DRM. Personally, I think it does nothing to prevent piracy. At most, all it does is inconvenience legitimate users, and treat them like criminals. This is a lesson that the music industry has worked very hard to not learn, but despite their best efforts, they’ve had to come to terms with reality. I fervently hope the publishing industry takes a lesson from the music business, and avoids the mistakes that turned record companies into the MAFIAA. But once again, I’m not privy to Tor Books’ policies with regard to this, so I can’t speak to it.

What device/apps/format do you prefer to use for reading e-books?

Let’s see. First, devices: I own a Kindle 2, a Nook, a Sony PRS-600, and an iPhone loaded with Stanza, Kindle, eReader, Scrollmotion, Classics, stand-alone book apps, and a slew of others. As of right now, I find that the PRS-600 is my go-to device for personal reading: it’s very nicely designed, the interface is simple and easy to use, it supports not only ePub, but the various formats that I use when reading manuscripts, and it’s relatively fast. Its biggest drawback is that it’s netblind, so I’m literally stalking my local BestBuy, waiting for the Sony Daily Edition to drop. My second go-to device is my iPhone running Stanza, and the only reason it doesn’t beat out the Sony is because of a) its smaller size and b) the fact that I can’t sync it with my Sony, the way I can sync the Kindle with Kindle on iPhone.

All that being said, I think eInk technology is a transition technology—the equivalent to 13-inch black-and white television sets, and I can’t wait till it’s put out to pasture. I also think that people who are not and will never be comfortable reading off of a backlit screen will eventually die—children growing up today reading on laptops, DSes, PSPs and iPhones will not have this problem (I know I don’t).

I’m convinced that The Unicorn (Apple’s mythical tablet device) will kill all these devices (or at least raise the bar considerably: the Sony desktop software tries damn hard to be iTunes—and fails comically; the Nook’s touchscreen UI is trying very hard to ape the iPhone’s UI—and failing; Kindle’s integration with Amazon is great, but it’s also clearly taking a page out of the iTunes/iPod/AppStore playbook), not because it will be an ereader device specifically, but because it will be a do-everything device which will also be used as an ereader (disclaimer: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool OG Apple fanboy, from way back in the day—we’re talking pre-Steve Jobs’ second coming, back when John Scully and Gil Amelio were running the company into the ground and owning a Mac wasn’t remotely cool. I admit I may be biased, although I don’t think I’m wrong).

Next, formats: As far as I’m concerned, and putting aside issues of legacy, the only ebook formats that matter to me are ePub, PDF and Mobi.

I love me some ePub. As a developer, it’s accessible and based on open standards, like XHTML, so it lowers the point of entry for people trying to make ebooks, which is a good thing. It also allows for multimedia and so-called ‘enhanced’ content, which, although I’m not convinced is as important as some people would like it to be, can’t hurt.

PDF is still the gold standard for controlling layout. As a graphic designer by training, and a typographer by vocation, I relish the amount of control over presentation that PDFs allow a designer, and I do think that there’s a place for that kind of thing within the ebook space. I think it’s a very, very diminished role, and re-flowable/resizeable text trumps a fixed layout in almost all cases, but the few exceptions are important: think children’s books, art books, etc.

Mobi needs to die, if only because it’s owned by one company. Yes, I’m aware that there are certain technical issues which may or may not make it a superior format to ePub, but to me, the fact that it’s owned by Amazon makes it a non-starter, in the same way that LRF (Sony) and MS Reader (Microsoft) are non-starters.

Aside from standard formats, I’m really interested to see what happens when developers and ebook makers start to leverage other technologies when making ebooks, especially as always-connected devices become more ubiquitous. I’m thinking of TuneKit (Apple’s framework for iTunes LPs and DVD extras, which in turn leverages Javascript and HTML), Adobe AIR (which I would have totally discarded as a bastard tech that doesn’t play well with *any* OS, until I saw Nick Bilton’s excellent New York Times 2.0 AIR app), and things like the Bonnier Mag+ demo (which, yes, is only so much vaporware, but still, a great concept for magazines).

Before any of this really, really takes off, though, it’s up to publishers to think of electronic formats in the initial stages of a book’s life, as opposed to simply as an afterthought late in the production or marketing stages. In a perfect world, I’d love to see authors sitting down with their editors and multimedia producers, and saying: "I’ve got this idea for a book. Should it be a straight-up prose novel/book/whatever, or should it be prose with video? Should it be a website with varying levels of engagement? Should it be a blog?" and so forth. I know this is anathema to some people in the publishing industry, who see themselves as ‘book people’, and I’m not saying that the book needs to go away (nor would I want it to, ever—I love books), but if publishers really want to cast themselves as the "stewards of intellectual property", it behooves them to have an active role in developing IP, regardless of what shape it takes.

A number of publishers have complained that the $9.99 e-book price point Amazon and Barnes & Noble are using is "predatory" and will damage the publishing industry. Does Tor have a position on this argument?

Again, I’m not Tor Books. I can say, however, that if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last year and a half, it’s that pricing is a very complex issue, and it’s not as cut-and-dried as it seems at first glance.

I was just looking at this article on e-book piracy (which TeleRead previously covered here).

Do you think e-book piracy has gotten worse lately as that article (and others I’ve seen) suggests, or just that with more people thinking about e-books they are just inclined to notice what is already there more?

I think the rise of ebooks into mainstream consumer awareness (thanks in large part to Amazon’s Kindle—for better or for worse) has created a larger awareness of piracy (both inside the industry and outside), but I wouldn’t venture to say that I have data to back up a statement like "piracy has gotten worse". I think that there’s plenty that publishers could do to combat piracy: not window titles, play around with pricing, etc., and I think that customers would respond to that, much like they have in other media. No one would be crazy enough to say that music piracy has stopped, but I’d be hard pressed to make a case that iTunes is not making money for the record companies, for example. I’m a firm believer in the Jobsian approach to piracy: give consumers a better, easier, simpler experience than piracy, and they will pay for the convenience.

Was there anything I haven’t brought up that you would like to, in closing?

I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. I’d love to plug some of the comics stuff we’re starting to do this year, but it may be premature, so I’ll say no, not yet.

I would like to thank Pablo Defendini for his gracious participation in this interview.

But there are also places where commercial e-books can be purchased. And while conflicting DRM may muddle the issue with purchases from places like Fictionwise (where “multiformat” books are Kindle-compatible but DRM-protected books are not), there are still places to buy e-books DRM-free.

One of these places in particular is one of my favorite publishing houses: Baen Books. Not only are Baen’s e-books free of restrictive Digital Rights Management, but they also beat (by several dollars) the Kindle’s infamous $9.99-per-book price point that is causing so much trouble with other publishing houses.

I will first go into a little of the history of Baen’s e-book endeavors and how and why they can offer these books without DRM and inexpensively. Then I will cover the process of syncing them to your Kindle.

(Note that this goes for owners of other e-book devices as well, such as Sony Readers or Nooks—Baen makes its books available in multiple DRM-free formats, and most readers can read at least one of them.)

An E-Book Pioneer

Baen has been in the e-book biz for a decade longer than most people have recognized there even was one. In late 1999, they offered their first “Webscription”: a bundle of four e-books released piecemeal over the course of three months.

Half of each book would be readable in the first month, the third quarter in the second month, then the complete book in the third month (at which time it could also be downloaded in multiple different formats).

These books were offered free of DRM because Jim Baen cordially disliked it. He also felt that his readers were trustworthy enough not to treat these e-books any differently than they would treat a print book—including the occasional loan to friends.

Free the Baen Library!

To demonstrate what Webscriptions had to offer, Baen posted the first book of David Weber’s popular Honor Harrington series as a free sample. In the months that followed, Weber noticed the print sales of his first few Harrington books had seen a jump that was quite unusual for books at that stage in their life cycle.

Baen writer Eric Flint saw an opportunity to poke at certain people who were insisting that e-books had to be locked down as tightly as possible to prevent financial ruin. Putting his money where his mouth was, he offered some of his own e-books for free as well—and convinced Jim Baen to let him make the same offer to anyone else who cared to try it.

This became the Baen Free Library, which currently offers several dozen titles for free download.

Giving It Away Even Faster

But Baen was not quite finished with its giveaways. When the Honor Harrington book War of Honor was published, the first printing came with a CD-ROM bound into a pocket in the back. The CD-ROM contained the complete Honor Harrington series to date, and a number of books from other Baen writers as well (including some that were not made available in the Free Library).

The CD came with blanket permission to copy, share, and upload its contents as long as long as it was for strictly noncommercial purposes—as did the dozen-plus more promotional CDs, bound into other books or handed out at trade shows, that followed. Consequently, people did so: the CD ISOs are available via BitTorrent, and are hosted on the Fifth Imperium website for downloading or browsing.

Strangely enough, it is nearly impossible to find any Baen titles circulating on peer-to-peer networks except for those CD-ROMs that have permission granted. It seems Jim Baen was justified in assuming that if you treat your customers like honest people (who don’t have to be “kept honest”), they will return the courtesy by being honest people.

For more information on Baen’s e-book philosophy, see Eric Flint’s “Prime Palaver” columns in the Baen Free Library, or his “Salvos Against Big Brother” columns in Jim Baen’s Universe.

Nobody Remembers You When You’re Successful

Baen’s Free Library and Webscription programs were covered by the New York Times in 2001. The piece recognized that Baen’s remarkable e-book practices were a financial success, both in their own right and in terms of sales increases for the paper books.

Webscriptions (www.webscription.net) makes a modest profit, and the give-away program, called Baen Free Library, is a volunteer effort with no overhead costs. But the two programs’ economic value to the company is incalculable. They have spurred sales of the company’s books, which are distributed through Viacom’s Simon & Schuster unit. Mr. Baen is particularly surprised that the electronic downloads have even stimulated sales of the company’s hardcover books.

It is a striking puzzle: the more e-texts Baen Books makes available cheaply or free, the more it has been able to sell the most expensive kind of printed book. ”We are drifting from being a paperback house to a hardcover one because of the Net,” Mr. Baen said.

But since then the media seems to have forgotten about them. Now, whenever papers breathlessly report Amazon giving away e-books for free, or commentators speculate whether ditching DRM would be bad for the e-book business, nobody seems to remember Baen has been doing these things already for over ten years.

Putting Baen on Your Kindle

As mentioned above, Baen books are available from the following three sources:

• The Baen Free Library (free)
• The Fifth Imperium Baen CD repository (free)
• Baen Webscriptions ($6 each, $15 for monthly bundles of 6 books, other package deals)

They may be downloaded in multiple open formats from each of these sources.

Because Baen sells e-books directly and cuts out any middlemen, Baen e-books will probably never be sold as Kindle titles through Amazon. However, it is simple to buy Baen e-books from Webscriptions or download them for free and copy those files onto your Kindle device manually.

Baen has its own instruction sheet for putting Baen e-books on your Kindle, but it boils down to simply downloading them in the Mobipocket format, then connecting your Kindle to your computer and dragging the Mobipocket files into its Documents folder.

Most e-book reading devices (Sony, Astak, etc.) offer a similar means of loading books onto them, or allow loading via Calibre. It just depends on which e-book format is preferred. (For example, Sony reads ePub; Astak can read Mobipocket but ePub generally works better.)

For those who do not wish to mess about with USB cables, Baen also offers an “Email book to my Kindle” link for each book in Webscriptions or the Free Library. Amazon will charge for this service at a rate of 15 cents per megabyte; however, most Baen e-books are well below 1 megabyte in size.

Also, today when we opened our presents, I was astonished—indeed, downright poleaxed—to discover the rest of my family had gotten together to buy me a brand new MSi A5000 laptop running Windows 7. I immediately installed FBReader and put all my Baen titles on it. Unlike my old Toshiba Satellite, this laptop is light enough that I almost could do the rotate-it-90-degrees trick mentioned a few posts ago.

But I have also been keeping an eye on e-book news. One of the stories today I have not seen on TeleRead yet is that a company called Paradigm Shift is planning to introduce some new color e-book readers at the Consumer Electronics Show—a 5” and a 7” model, selling for $150 and $200 respectively. They are apparently not going the e-ink route; they are stated to have “high resolution screens with high contrast”. Ordinary LCDs, or something else? The article does not say.

However, it does say that these devices will do more than just read e-books (in a variety of formats, including unprotected ePub). The smaller one will have a photo viewer and mp3 player; the larger one will have wifi and be able to access chat programs and play YouTube videos, among other things. Seems like it is being positioned as a competitor in the same Internet tablet market as the Joo Joo nee CrunchPad and the iSlate.

One of the songs I sang in Rock Band today was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away Now”. On that note, here is another article pointing out that Amazon’s best “selling” Kindle titles are the ones it makes available for free. It opens by saying that, thanks to Amazon’s $9.99 preferred price point, e-books are often cheaper than paper ones. But, as usual, there is no mention of the pioneering work Baen put into that field.

The e-book marketplace, Pogue notes, changed considerably this year. Although he only hit a few of the high points, this got me started thinking about all the different ways that e-books have been in the news this year. In no particular order:

There were new offerings from the Kindle in both hardware and software, and new hardware from Sony, too. Companies like BeBook, JetBook, Astak came out with new readers. The CrunchPad made a big splash, then went down the tubes. Tantalizing rumors of an Apple tablet took on some substance.

Barnes and Noble entered the e-book software, then the e-book hardware market. (And as an aside, I got an unintentional chuckle from Pogue’s column with the sentence, “At least on paper [emphasis mine], the Barnes & Noble Nook offers much that the Kindle lacks.”)

Fictionwise lost a large chunk of its MobiPocket DRM’d books when one of its distributors, Overdrive, decided not to renew the distribution contract—reminding everyone once more just how fragile DRM’d purchases are. (Fictionwise then did the right thing and got permission to replace the DRM’d purchases with an alternate format.)

Fictionwise came out with an eReader for Blackberry (though its promised Linux port apparently has not yet materialized).

The FTC looked into Digital Rights Management—though apparently not very hard. Apple rejected an e-book application for allowing access to the Kama Sutra on Project Gutenberg, then changed its mind.

New e-book stores popped up all over the place. Baen Webscriptions became accessible on both BookShelf and Stanza, with Kindle-style instant downloading ability. Sony announced it would be dropping LRF and switching exclusively to EPUB.

Google Books opened its doors to mobile devices—and a little later, caused a controversy when it announced the terms of its settlement with the Authors Guild.

There was plenty of consolidation, too. Fictionwise bought eReader, then Barnes and Noble bought Fictionwise. Amazon bought Stanza.

More than any year that came before it, for e-books 2009 has been what the Chinese might call “interesting times”. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

A number of other sites are doing Thanksgiving lists (Ars Technica, Wired, another Wired, and Wired again on things not to be thankful for), and I thought I would assay one of my own. Of course, we all know that we have a lot more to be thankful for than just e-book-related things, but they are this site’s focus after all.

There are a lot of people and companies that have made a difference in the e-book industry this year, and I thank the ones important to me below. These are the folks who I think have made reading e-books easier for me, or provided the e-books that I want to read, or have just plain done something cool.

Some of these are big, industry-wide things. Others are little things that may only be important to me and a number of other fans. Some of them may surprise you.

But that’s all right. This is a list of things for which I personally give thanks. If you’re thankful for something I left out, please add it in the comments.

1. Project Gutenberg, Baen (and The Fifth Imperium), Cory Doctorow, Feedbooks, Manybooks, Mobileread, Fictionwise, and everybody else who releases e-books free (or cheap), in multiple formats, and without DRM. Thanks to you guys, we can always be assured of having something to read no matter what kind of device we have. Keep up the good work.

2. The movement toward EPUB as an industry standard. The Tower of e-Babel may be slowly crumbling, and every publisher and e-book reader who supports EPUB is helping to build something new out of the fallen bricks. We still have DRM to deal with, but maybe one of these years I’ll be thankful for that going away too (as it already has from Apple’s music store). Thank you, those responsible. (And for avowed hold-out Amazon, a big hearty raspberry. PBBBBT.)

3. The explosion of e-book readers. Some look at the availability of a dozen different kinds of e-book reader as e-Babel in the making. And to an extent it is. But on the other hand, more different devices means it is more likely for any given person to find a device that fits his specific lifestyle.

And many of these readers include support for EPUB (except for Amazon’s Kindle. Again, PBBBBT). What’s more, all the competition will drive prices down—especially once there is competition among e-ink screen providers to lower those prices.

Not least, the fact that there are so many different competing devices and apps provides some validation that e-books are finally starting to be desirable items, after ten-plus years of being swept under the carpet. So thanks, everyone who has created an e-book device or an e-book reader app for a PDA, smartphone, or computer. (Even, grudgingly, Amazon.)

4. My iPod Touch, and the reader apps on it. Maybe this should actually be “3a” instead of “4”, but I wanted to single out this amazing little device for some particular thanks.

Twenty-two years ago (God, was it really that long?) Star Trek: The Next Generation had these amazing little “Personal Access Display Devices” or “PADDs”, created entirely out of special effects: wafer-thin panes of glass that displayed text and images and allowed instant access to information stored in the ship’s computer.

Now we have iPhones and iPod Touches: wafer-thin panes of glass that display text and images and allow instant access to information stored in the cloud. Last year, Jeff Kirvin wondered if Palm’s Nova project would be “Palm’s new PADD”. In fact, the Nova turned out to be the Pre—a fairly anemic attempt to copy the iPhone (to the point of hacking in an illicit sync method to Apple’s iTunes software). The PADD is already here.

With my iPod Touch, I can download e-books from about a zillion different sites using Bookshelf, Stanza, eReader, Shortcovers—yes, even the Kindle app. It offers much of the same advantage of the Kindle in terms of instant book download availability as long as a wifi network is at hand (the iPhone, of course, offers the exact same advantage with its 3G network—but on the other hand, it also has all those plan fees). And in terms of format and book source, it is considerably more flexible than the Kindle—or indeed, any other smartphone that I know of at the moment.

Plus, I can listen to music, watch movies, surf the web. In fact, I can hook into wifi and do about 90% of the things for which I would otherwise want a laptop—email, ssh, IRC.

Granted, Apple’s closed environment causes a considerable number of headaches. But on the other hand, jailbreaking has gotten easier and easier, and it will never entirely go away. Cydia will always be waiting for those who need the kind of openness Apple refuses to provide.

So thank you all: Apple, Bookshelf, Lexcycle (for Stanza), Fictionwise and eReader, Shortcovers, Amazon, and the jailbreak community. Thanks to you, I have a PADD in my pocket—and so do literally millions of other people.

5. Google Book Search. All right, this is not an unalloyed good thing in and of itself. There are still a number of questions over the balance between the rights of Google and of the authors and publishers of the works being scanned. February will bring another hearing into the matter.

But even those who dislike Google’s scanning project must surely admit that it is bringing much-needed attention to the issue of orphan works and the fact that there is simply no good legal solution for making them available to those who want them. Perhaps Congress will enact legislation to help ease things for everyone.

Thanks, Google, for getting in there and causing a controversy. Sometimes, that’s what it takes to bring about necessary change.

6. Baen’s rescue of Meisha Merlin alumni P.C. Hodgell, Sharon Lee, and Steve Miller. Granted, this was something to be thankful for in 2008, too, but now we are starting to see the fruits of those efforts.

When small publisher Meisha Merlin collapsed, it left these authors stranded. Both Hodgell’s and Lee and Miller’s books were cult favorites with a history of difficulty finding publishers. (Hodgell in particular averaged about one novel per publisher before having to turn around and find a new one.)

But Baen came to the rescue, reissuing these writers’ past bodies of work in omnibus e-book format, then omnibus printed format, then commissioning new works from them. And so Hodgell will be able to finish her beguiling Kencyr series, and Lee and Miller have published two fantasy books and have four new books in their popular Liaden setting here or on the way (Fledgling, Saltation, Mouse and Dragon, Ghost Ship).

It is a great time to be a fan of these writers. Thanks again, Baen, for lending a helping hand.

7. The promise of better things to come. If these trends keep going, and prices keep falling, sooner or later e-books will become affordable to everyone. We may yet see the mythical “$50 e-book device,” or maybe even “$20 e-book device”, that will get past the “but what if I leave it on the bus?” factor and see widespread adoption. After all, PADDs were fiction twenty years ago.

Who knows what there will be to be thankful for next year?

Or, all right, your wish list on whatever shopping site you like to use. (But let’s face it, Amazon’s marketing machine is good enough that “Amazon” and “wish list” have pretty much become synonymous over the last few years.)

But this year, Amazon has something new cooking, that may entice you away from other sites’ wish lists: the “universal” wish list button. This is a great idea for everybody who has “wishes” from multiple e-tailer websites—especially those who buy e-books elsewhere (such as Webscriptions) but use Amazon’s wish list for their Amazon purchases.

I can’t remember exactly when Amazon announced this new innovation, though I get the feeling it was recently. It works through the use of a “bookmarklet” tool that you drag to your browser’s bookmark bar.

When you find an item that you would like to add to your Amazon wish list, just click the bookmarklet, then enter the price of the item and a description. When you are done, the item appears on your Amazon Wish List, with a button to redirect the wish list viewer to the origin site for shopping purposes.

This is a very clever innovation indeed. Given that Amazon is already the “go-to” site for wish lists, this provides a way that wishers can combine their wishes from all their favorite sites in one convenient place. Even if I strongly dislike some of Amazon’s business practices (with regard to the Kindle versus Mobipocket formats, for instance), I have to tip my hat to—and make use of—such a darned useful feature.

I have already added a couple of Baen Webscription months to my Amazon wish list, as well as a BluRay DVD drive from NewEgg. I can’t wait to see what I might wish for next!

Fledgling

The novel Fledgling, and its sequel Saltation, are two of the biggest success stories of the “Storyteller’s Bowl” e-publishing format. As we reported before, the idea behind this format is that the writer agrees to post one chapter per week as long as reader donations hit a certain threshold. (Here is a PBS Mediashift article on the practice, including an interview with Lee & Miller.)

Necessity

Necessity is considered a powerful force by Liaden characters; these characters often use the phrase “necessity exists” to explain why they must take some risky action.

Thus, it seems entirely appropriate that the idea for Fledgling was born out of financial necessity: when Lee & Miller’s publisher Meisha Merlin went under without paying the royalties it owed them, they needed a quick source of income to get them through the winter.

At the same time, they needed to explore the backstory to a mysterious character introduced on the last page of the last “main plotline” Liaden novel published back in 2002. Since the character would feature prominently in the next “main” novel (were a publisher to be interested), they needed to “meet” her and learn more about her and her world.

The problem was that such side-story books are generally “expected to be of little interest, except to stalwart fans of a series,” and do not tend to sell well to publishers. Thus, Lee and Miller decided simply to publish it themselves. In lieu of an advance, they would write and post the draft using the “Storyteller’s Bowl” format.

The idea was that once the draft had been fully written, they would pay to have it professionally edited and then printed, and send copies to those people who had donated at least $25 each. Happily, the book and its sequel were eventually picked up for publication by Baen making that no longer necessary.

As Lee and Miller write in the book’s Afterword:

We figured, you see, that we would start off strong, then donations would slope away, and we’d be posting a chapter every, oh, two or three weeks.

Before December was over, readers had funded ten chapters. By the time the first chapter was posted, we were committed to writing twenty weekly episodes in the life and times of Theo Waitley.

In the end, they wrote 31 chapters, which became 42 in the final book.

The Liaden Universe

Fledgling is set in the Liaden Universe, a setting that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have been living in for decades. The Liaden stories combine an amazing number of genres—science-fiction, space-opera, fantasy, romance, espionage, military, wild-west, and more. It is one of my favorite settings, and I like to reread it from start to finish every so often.

Centuries after fleeing a collapsing universe, humanity is split into at least three sub-races: Terrans, Liadens, and Yxtrangi. The galaxy is still very much a frontier, like the wild west, and Pilots are a highly-respected cross between long-haul truck driver and samurai.

The main five-book arc tells an epic story, and the other books and short stories weave many threads through and around that story to create a universe that feels like a rich tapestry. Baen is reprinting these books in omnibus form, and already offers “e-omnibus” bundles of all the novels prior to Fledgling and most of the related short stories.

Fledgling

Much as I do highly recommend reading them all, no knowledge of these earlier works is necessary to enjoy Fledgling. Having read them does enrich the experience, but apart from one or two minor references to past continuity (such as the way Professor Jen Sar Kiladi converses with a woman named Aellianna inside his head), the book is quite self-contained. It is a coming-of-age story for a character who is herself being introduced to the larger galaxy, so readers can be introduced to it at the same time.

The protagonist is a girl named Theo Waitley, who was introduced in the Back to the Future style “here we go again” ending of I Dare—a young woman who runs up to the main characters, out of breath, with a problem that she can only describe as “kind of complicated” before the book ends.

Fledgling is set several years earlier, when Theo is on the cusp of adulthood, just a few months away from her coming-of-age ceremony. She lives and studies in a university on the planet Delgado, a “safe world” renowned for its scholarship. And she has problems fitting in.

Theo has just had to move out of her father, Jen Sar Kiladi’s, house back to the cramped, sterile confines of the university itself. And as a half-Liaden (and more importantly, half-Korval Liaden, though she does not know it), her reflexes are a problem. Though she actually has extremely good reflexes, they do not mesh well with the average reflexes most other students have—so she is the one who is labeled “clumsy”.

At the same time, her mother Kamele has problems of her own: cases of academic dishonesty and document alteration have been found that threaten the reputation of the entire university. She and Kiladi must intrigue to uncover the conspiracy behind it before it is too late.

The Perils of Academe

Perilous academic settings are a staple of the Liaden books, perhaps because the authors come from academic backgrounds themselves. One book featured a university where “defending one’s thesis” was done with swords and daggers.

The world of Delgado is not quite that dangerous, but it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time in the way that good settings often are. Since it is a “safe world,” emphasis is placed on the safety and conformity of its inhabitants. There are strict curfews, and security police who record all incidents.

The world is “safe” for most of its inhabitants—but it poses a challenge to Theo, since she does not conform to the society’s norms. This provides an interesting chance to examine the practice of “tranquilizing into normality” that some people practice even today.

Another interesting twist to the setting is that Delgado is decidedly matriarchal: women are the ones whose rights take precedence. Cultural norms vary from world to world, of course (the idea of “local custom” taking precedence is one of the major themes of the setting), and Pilot culture is something else altogether. All these different cultures give the setting a very interesting flavor.

First Draft vs. Final

I first read this book in its serialized draft form as it was posted chapter by chapter, in 2007. Since I donated $25, I recently received my autographed hardcover copy of the finished book, which I read over the last day or so.

It was a good book, but the inconvenience of carrying it around with me made me long for the electronic version. The e-version does also exist, of course. Thanks to Baen Webscriptions, it can be bought and then downloaded in a variety of formats. I will probably purchase it eventually, but could not justify it given that I had the print book already.

The change from draft to final form is definitely noticeable. The final book is a lot more polished, and takes into account ideas that formed during the writing of the sequel, Saltation. It also fleshes out a subplot that I seem to remember appearing only vaguely in the draft and not actually coming to any sort of fruition.

Conclusion

If Fledgling has a problem, it is that it really only tells half the story. As is often the case with books, the original tale grew in the telling until it was necessary to create a sequel project, Saltation, to tell the second half—and Saltation will not be published by Baen until April, 2010. It does not end as abruptly as Peter David’s Darkness of the Light, but it still stops at a point where the reader wants to know what happens next.

For those who are really impatient after finishing Fledgling, the draft form of Saltation is still available to read on-line at Lee & Miller’s website. (I might just go read it again myself.)

And some other good news: it was recently announced that Baen has contracted for the book that will continue Saltation and follow I Dare, tentatively titled Ghost Ship. We Liad fans can hardly wait.

As a well-written coming-of-age story about a fun character in an interesting setting, Fledgling is well worth checking out.