Book People Archive

Baen books online 

SF publisher Baen Books recently announced that its books are now readable
online free of charge to all readers who are blind, dyslexic, paralyzed,
or amputees.  The announcement was made November 14, "in recognition of
Veterans Day, and all our disabled military veterans", according to their
press release at

    https://www.webscription.net/news.aspx?showarticle=2

Since 1999, Baen has made all its new books (and at least
some of its older backlist) available online through their Webscriptions
web site, usually before the print editions come out.  That site is
subscription based, usually with a monthly fee, but disabled readers
in the categories above can now apply to www.readassist.org for a free
subscription.  (It looks like readers with these disabilities qualify whether
or not they're veterans.)

Baen also makes a selection of its books online free for everyone on its
Baen Free Library site.  I've been listing these titles for years. They've
also been including CD-ROMs in some of their print editions that include
electronic editions of parts of their backlist, including some
books that are not on their regular Free Library site.

I've seen a few sites offer mirrors of these CD-ROMs, but to date hadn't
been listing them because I wasn't sure of their legal status, and also
because many of these sites did not last long, or only provided full CD
ROM ISOs, which are useful for burning discs but not so much for reading
an individual book online.

However, Karsten Stiller informed me a while back of a site
(baencd.thefifthimperium.com) that seems
to have most of the Baen CDs browsable and readable on the Web, and that
site is still around 4 months after he told me about it.  And I've tracked
down a Baen CD in our library, finding a label saying that the CD may be
shared but not sold, which appears to give the green light for noncommercial
web sharing.

So I plan to start indexing these (a bit at a time, and only the titles
that aren't already in the Free Library, so as to avoid swamping
the site with an excessive bandwidth spike) over the next while.  We'll
see how it goes.

John