Print is Dead

In 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!"

Hit Baen.com and you enter a 365-days-a-year SF convention; Eric Flint giving masterclasses in writing (and expounding his own highly erudite view of history), David Drake […] popping in to discuss the pre-Principate political basis of one of his series while John Ringo is convulsing himself, and some scores of others, at some of the plot implications for the next book in the series he is co-writing with David Weber. […] Many people (authors and readers alike) use it as their first point of reference, as there are so many knowledgeable folks online.

During Baen's brief foray into magazine publishing, Baen's Bar was the only means to submit manuscripts to the Grantville Gazette and Jim Baen's Universe; even today, Weisskopf and the editorial staff regularly communicate with Baen's readers and authors through the Bar. Authors in Baen's Bar are known for posting 1,500-word snippets of works in progress as frequently as three times a week, up to six months before publication. These snippets are collected by Joe Buckley at his website, "Collected Driblets of Baen: A Frankly Promotional Endeavor...", which bears the tag-line: "Pushing ‘web-crack’ since August 1999."

Grantville Gazette

Though Baen's Bar and the company's website have received much well-deserved praise, Baen.com, the Free Library, and the Bar as web technologies look and feel considerably dated. "This website is pathetic in terms of technology and it desperately needs a makeover," writes another Barfly, frustrated with Baen.com’s "cumbersome to use" and "hard to search" design. "It is like a Model T in a 2003 Ferrari world […] It has the feel of an amateur with some web skills tossing things together and deciding it is 'good enough.' I put up with it for the content." While Baen Books is noteworthy for having supported ReadAssist.org and for having offered its WebScription service for free to disabled readers, Baen's website does not conform to World Wide Web Consortium standards or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative. On these issues, Weisskopf writes "We'll be doing a complete overhaul of [Baen.com] in the upcoming year. Accessibility will be one of the considerations." Interested in taking Baen.com to the next level, Weisskopf plans to make "Baen more and more interactive. With Baen's Bar, we already satisfy a certain amount of the social aspect that the rest of the Web is discovering, but I’d like to nurture and expand on that." As Baen Books considers its future on the web, nothing will be more valuable to the company than this kind of attitude.

In 1999, Baen Books instituted the policy of buying all electronic rights in contracts with its new authors. Unlike its major competitors, the house pays its authors a handsome 20% in royalties for its eARCS (electronic Advance Reader Copies) and individual e-book sales. (Writes Weisskopf on the company's community messageboard Baen's Bar: "There is a complicated formula for calculating the e-book royalty Baen pays, known only to the Mysterious Marla […] Authors and agents do get the formula, but only if they can tell me or Marla the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow!") Since then, Baen Books has acquired the work of many classic science fiction authors, including Fritz Leiber, Orson Scott Card, Peter Straub, Dan Simmons, L. Sprague de Camp, and Larry Niven.

The Last Centurion

Jim Baen's insistence that his e-books be free of format restrictions, an insistence that echoes Stewart Brand's observation, “Information wants to be free,” underscores the company's belief that electronic publishing technologies should empower the end user. For example, Baen Books does not offer any of its titles in PDF format: "What [PDF] does is generate files […] that are extremely opaque to standard word processing software, so that if, for example, you downloaded Time's table of contents, you would be stuck with that appearance: no changes allowed, or possible. Can't change the margins, can't change font sizes, can't grab text for pasting, can't anything." Instead, Baen sells printable, multi-format, DRM-free e-books through its fifteen-dollar WebScription service, which puts out electronic galleys of novels undergoing editorial development at Wake Forest for readers to purchase before the novels appear in print. The WebScription package includes at least four new novels that are released in portions as editorial development approaches the print publication date. These e-books are available in HTML format before the novel is published; once the print version is released, Baen releases the WebScription bundle in MS Reader, Palm, Psion, Rocket eBook, and Rich Text format. In addition, Baen sells individual eARCs—complete, unedited manuscripts of novels in development—for fifteen dollars well in advance of even the WebScription release dates (more than five months pre-publication). The price of eARCs decrease as the novel comes closer to its publication date, recognizing that readers’ demand for the unedited manuscript wanes as the fully-edited version nears completion.

Jim 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.'"