Dragaera

Issola Spoilers vs. Orca Spoilers

Gaertk at aol.com Gaertk at aol.com
Wed Mar 12 13:09:02 PST 2003

"Andrew Lias" <anrwlias at hotmail.com> writes:

> Or taking a book that was marked for destruction.  If you 
> ever see paperbacks with the covers torn off of them in a 
> discount bin, please don't buy them.  The author did not 
> receive any royalties from that copy.

Massmarket (aka "strippable") books have (for the last couple
decades at least) a notice on the copyright page saying 
something like: [this one is from my copy of _Dragon_]

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should
  be aware that this book is stolen property.  It was 
  reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and
  neither the author nor the publisher has received any
  payment for this "stripped" book.

Lately (the last year or so) they've started putting a 
triangle next to the barcode, with an S inside if the book is
stripable, empty otherwise.  I even have a couple hardcovers
with the empty triangle (though I've never seen a stripable
hardcover).

> When I bought _War of Honor_, I was very surprised that 
> Baen had included a CD-ROM that not only had all the text 
> of the previous Honor books, but a large unabridged 
> selection of other books on their list.  Most surprising 
> was the following statement on the disk:
>
> "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared, but 
> not sold."

Nice, isn't it?  I got the CD from the library and dumped the
ebooks onto my harddrive in case I ever feel like reading any
of them.

> Apparently, Baen has taken a rather agressive policy of 
> making many of their older titles free to the public.  I 
> don't know how that will ultimately work out for them, but 
> I certainly like the idea.

I believe many (if not all) the titles on that CD were in 
print.  In fact, _March to the Stars_ was still being written
at the time (that's why they only included the first 10
chapters).

They starting by offering ebooks free from their website, and
claim that sales of dead tree versions *of*those*titles* have
gone up as a result.  The CD-ROM is just the next step.  And
the next book by David Drake they publish will have a CD 
containing several other titles by Drake.  Including one 
novel that was published by Tor.


-KG