The Baen Free Library

Over a decade before the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle were twinkles in the eyes of their makers, and several years before the Rocket eBook would enter the market, the late Jim Baen was quietly testing the waters of electronic publishing. With prescience for the potential of the web and a keen ability to spot new talent and develop writers into authors, the former editor of If and Galaxy magazine took Simon & Schuster’s science fiction line into a bold new arena at a time when electronic publishing was not a buzz-word but an infant. “I’ll give you a quote from an editorial letter Jim wrote to Keith Laumer when Keith proposed a new Bolo novel. I think it sums up Baen’s philosophy to a T,” writes current publisher Toni Weisskopf, in an email interview: “‘New novel: Absolutely. As I said only somewhat coherently over the phone, this time I would like something that hints at the profound erudition possessed by the author and is driven by a plot imbued with the deepest philosophical insight into the essential tragedy of the human condition as it is and places it in the most bathetic contrast to what could, in a better world, be our birthright. Something with scope. Something with sentient tanks.’”

Baen BooksJim Baen moved from the lowly complaints department of Ace Books (the granddaddy of science fiction publishers in the United States—now an adult imprint of Penguin), to Galaxy and If magazines, and later Tor, to found Baen Books in Wake Forest, North Carolina through a deal with Simon & Schuster, who had originally hired him to reorganize their science fiction Pocket Books division. Jim would provide Simon & Schuster with a line of science fiction books for the publisher to distribute, and in turn he would have the freedom to run his own publishing company. Much of Baen Book’s success with e-books may be attributed to Jim Baen’s freedom to pursue a model for the distribution of e-books that ran counter to “established” wisdom. Like the “philosophy of free” touted by Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson in his 2008 article, “Why $0.00 is the Future of Business,” Baen Books’ electronic publishing philosophy proposes that businesses can make money on the web by literally giving away their products. This radical thinking—which has both gumption and solid figures to back it up—was not so radical to Baen’s editor-novelist and “First Librarian” Eric Flint, who at the turn of the millennium expounded on the company’s philosophy in straightforward analogies, like this one:

[The] internet has internationalized the reading audience to an extent which was unimaginable in the days of purely paper communication […] whatever income an author loses from the theft which the internet makes possible is more than offset by the expansion of his or her potential audience. […] Any retailer in the world, after all, can put an absolute stop to any shoplifting instantly. Just require your customers to undergo a full search when they leave your premises—including body cavities. Yup, no more shoplifting. Congratulations. Oh—and, yup. No more customers. Congratulations.

Flint’s “Prime Palaver” series started as a response to Baen Books’ decision to open the Baen Free Library and grew to encapsulate one of the few early dialogues about “freeconomics” [sic], as a viable model for increasing the sales of both print and electronic books. With Jim Baen’s support, Flint started the Baen Free Library as an online repository for unencrypted, full-length Baen texts. As of 2008, the Library hosts 111 novels, all of which are available for free download in multiple electronic formats. Contribution to the Library by authors is entirely voluntary, though first-time authors are encouraged to deposit their debut novel no earlier than nine months after the book has been published, in order to drive the sales of future novels. And while the Library is a primitive artifact on an Internet of Web 2.0 wonders, the fundamental formula underlying the site is forward-thinking: that “zero from zero equals zero” and that making authors more accessible to readers through the web will drive sales. “It’s a misperception on their part,” writes Weisskopf of publishers unwilling to free e-books from the shackles of DRM encryption “[…] they think in terms of ‘lost sales’ not ‘new customers created.’”