Where’s the sign up list? I am the Ivan you mentioned in the article.

The poker game was indeed a good time.

- Ivan

These have always existed in the publishing industry; they’re copies of the text as delivered by the author, prior to final proofing. In the Olden Days a few copies to a few hundred copies (depending on the prominence of the author) would be printed up for publicity and review purposes, and for the purposes of actually doing the final proofing. They would never be offered for sale officially. You can often buy them second-hand on sites like ABE, where reviewers sell ARCs of particularly prominent authors as a handy second source of income.

Baen realized there was a neat gap in the market here for particularly hardcore fans and started, quite recently, putting the ARC text of new books up on webscriptions for their most popular authors, at an increased price. But if you just wait for the official release date, you’ll get the final proofed text for $5, which is their standard price for actually-released books.

I dunno the terms Baen uses, but as a fairly small publisher, I’d expect they’re reasonably good. I’ve never heard of any authors being particularly displeased with Baen, though often the most successful Baen authors will sign up with bigger publishers in order to increase their mass-market distribution once they’ve established a reputation through Baen.

I applaud your efforts to obtain your books the legal and proper way, unfortunately I gave up trying a long time ago. My main issue is with the pricing structure – I would gladly pay 3euros for an ebook, but I refuse to pay the ridiculous prices they put on their printing-cost-free digitally distributed ebooks.

Thank you for that link to Baen, I’ve had a quick look and will browse more when I get home from work…. however, the only author I recognised was priced at $15! It wouldn’t even be too bad if I didn’t know he is probably only getting a few pennies of that price, while the publisher laughs all the way to the giant pile of cash they’re hiding.

This whole thing is such a great big pity though, ebooks had so much potential until the greed factor kicked in

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101008/03400911332/ebook-publishers-never-learned-drm-ridiculous-prices.shtml