"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