The Future of Baen Books

Print is DeadIn his 2008 book, Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, Jeff Gomez augurs that the future of electronic publishing depends on whether publishers are prepared to meet the demands of a new generation of readers he calls “Generation Download.” This generation, he argues, “is the first generation to come of age not knowing anything but an existence with the web.” The implication is that web users under the age of thirty do not possess the same sentimentality for print books as we do, because they have grown up with a plethora of portable devices, such as cell phones, iPods, digital cameras, laptops, and portable hard-drives. Uncannily, Gomez’s ideas echo the view both Toni Weisskopf and Eric Flint championed years before Print is Dead hit bookstores. Flint wrote:

As technology improves and electronic books become as readable as paper books, this “hardcopy preference” factor will fade away. [There] is a generational issue involved, and […] as more and more old farts like me who grew up on paper books die off, the newer generation “accustomed to reading on a screen” will set the preferences.

In a 2005 interview with Canada’s National Association of Speculative Fiction Professionals, Weisskopf reaffirmed Flint’s sentiments:

We are running into a new generation of people who don’t automatically turn to books for entertainment. Partly this is because the publishing establishment hasn’t been giving people entertaining books to read on a regular basis. And for me, entertainment has to include intellectual stimulation. Baen hasn’t lost track of that, so I don’t think we’ll lose readership but instead only will grow to fill the vacuum created by others falling down on the job.

If publishers don’t meet these consumers’ expectations, Gomez warns, print as a format is doomed to the same fate as books in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “Generation Download” will become apathetic to reading and nobody will care about the death of books. “Bradbury was not worried about the loss of books themselves. His main concern was with a society that killed the need for reading, replacing the act with the narcotic of passive entertainment. The disappearance of books was merely what happened when people stopped caring about them.”

Toni Weisskopf remains optimistic about the future of electronic publishing, however. “Right now, all e-books are ‘unenhanced’ versions of the paper books. At some point, authors who are comfortable with all that the Net can do will start enhancing their text naturally as part of their process. With color, with links, with music—sky’s the limit.” Because Baen Books is prepared to embrace the new media rather than run from it, the potential for engaging “Generation Download” in ways that were unfathomable to print publishers a decade ago become mere technical hurdles. But can Baen Books’ optimism change a Luddite industry’s stance on DRM and e-book distribution models? “Only the marketplace will do that. But I do think visionary leaders, like Steve Jobs in the music world, will eventually have enough clout, and enough market research will emerge, so the industry will change. Figure sooner rather than later,” writes Weisskopf. And if it’s up to the marketplace, what can readers do to help speed up the process? “Every time the issue gets mentioned in the press, email the author about Baen Books and how our groundbreaking program led the way. If you see pirated versions of the books, let the pirates know the books can be found for reasonable prices at Baen.com. Most of the time that stops them. People just want access to the books—not an unreasonable desire!”