Baen Books specializes in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Jim Baen has been an editor and publisher of science fiction since 1974. He started his own company in 1984, and Baen
Books has gone on to publish some of the industry's top authors, including David Weber, Gregory Benford, Charles Sheffield,
David Drake, and Larry Niven. Of special interest to this discussion, Baen Books has a number of electronic product
offerings.
I got interested in Interviewing Jim Baen for this
section on The Future of Reading after I
met him at the World Science Fiction convention, where he was the
Publisher Guest of Honor. We talked for awhile about publishing in
general, and electronic publishing specifically. I think Baen Books
is using electronic media extremely well as a complement to its
traditional, and still primary, business of publishing paper books.
1. Baen Books has been offering WebScriptions for over a year.
Your FAQ describes WebScriptions as “A web based re-creation of the serialized novel using Science Fiction published by Baen
Books. Each novel will be published in three segments, one month apart, beginning 3 months before the actual publication
date. Each month 4 books will be available.” Can you talk a bit about the success and growth of this offering, and the feedback
you receive?
Well, there really hasn’t been a lot of growth. We started with a small advertising push (and an
extremely popular novel by David Weber) at about one thousand subscribers. We slowly drifted down to five
hundred or so, and in the last three months have drifted back up to a thousand to twelve hundred. I
suspect that this later growth has been a result of the attention garnered by our decision to set up a “Free
Baen Library” on our site, by the way.
2. Do you expect to increase this service in the next year?
I’m not sure how to answer that. Webscriptions is up and running. (Just go to
Baen.com and click on Webscriptions to sign up or find out more. :) On the
other hand we plan to keep all the titles published in Webscriptions available on-line forever or until such
time as we don’t want to anymore. Also, our Free Library service will grow and grow. Currently we are
trying to focus on first novels in currently popular series, but these are early days.
3. How does WebScriptions complement your publishing
business?
Well, about like ham compliments eggs. (Hey, that looks like a typo or misspelling, but it is really a play
on homonyms. :) The money is small, but the attention is very large, by which I mean that I suspect that those
who join up are highly enthusiastic opinion makers
with regard to science fiction, plus they know their way around the world-wide web.
4. Your company posts free sample chapters of upcoming books
on the Baen web site. Can you explain how sample chapters compare and contrast with WebScriptions?
Sure, samples are just that – partial offerings, electronic “chap books” intended to make potential
readers aware of and whet their appetite for the novel from which the chapter is taken. Webscriptions on the
other hand offer the book itself. I personally suspect though that the real function of Webscriptions from
my point of view is almost exactly the same as Samples, only more so.
I guess I need to pause and explain the mechanics
here. Webscriptions are actually keyed into samples in the following way:
Starting several months before publication we start teasing the audience with a
chapter or two at a time from each novel to be published by Baen in a given month. We do this for
maybe a quarter of each book. Then we introduce, three months prior to physical publication, the first
half of the novels, which of course includes and subsumes the free samples. Four weeks later we
update the Webscription so that it includes three fourths of each novel to be published in the given
month. Then, a couple of weeks before the official on-sale-in-paper date we put up the entire novel along
with its cohort for the month. The final installment, unlike the earlier ones, is fully edited and identical to
the paper version. The earlier partials are posted too soon for this to be practical.
I’m also thinking about making any Webscribed title available as a solo purchase for $5.00, but I need to
talk to my Webmaster Arnold to see if this is practicable. The reason I think this would be neat from
my point of view is that it would highlight what a darned bargain four or five books for $10 is, because
the one for five would be seen as a great bargain too!
5. Baen Books also hosts an active electronic discussion area
called Baen’s Bar. I sometimes visit and, frankly, its one of the best implementation I've seen of this technology – posts are
frequent and generally have a high level of quality content. How does Baen’s Bar complement your publishing business?
Like eggs compliment ham? :) This is opinion-shaping at its highest pitch. Best of all, I don’t have to be
Machievellian about it, but can just let the natural thing happen naturally. After all they are in the Bar
because they like the books we publish, so when they get to talking about them what it amounts to is
refining and clarifying and unifying generally positive opinions. (Not always though: every once in a while
they get really mad at a book. I will name no titles.)
When they get really enthusiastic, like for example with the butter-bugs sequence from A Civil Campaign, by
Lois Bujold, they can literally wag the Amazon. For a while that title was #7 on Amazon’s pre-pub list in a
month when King’s latest – which was to be published the same month – was #8. Such is the influence the
self-named Bar Flies can have when they really buzz together.
6. Please take a few moments and share your vision of digital
publishing. How much of the book and story market do you think is digital today? How fast do you think that will change, and what
will drive that change?
Frankly I think it is a specialty market. Since we agreed to this interview the Wall Street Journal has done a
special report that reached pretty much the same conclusion; compared to paper publishing there ain’t
no money in it, and won’t be for a while. My guess at the current share of “eye time” for e-fiction is. . . . a
tenth of one percent. Higher among constant computer users, of course – maybe a full percent.
What will change it. Well. . . . if books suddenly required a multi-pound, multi-thousand dollar device
to make them readable, that might make e-books more attractive, especially if the text on paper books
suddenly became comparatively blurry and gave you a headache after an hour’s close use. To me this is so
obvious that I find other opinions somewhat surreal. :)
To put it another way, as soon as we have a one-pound “book reader” that shows a thousand non-glowing
dots per inch on a six-inch-wide by eight-inch-high screen that sells for under two hundred dollars – well
paper publishing will then become the specialty item. But as of now, paper is just infinitely more pleasant,
and we do read fiction for the fun of it, you know. If Moore’s Law (twice as much bang for the buck year by
year in computers) applied to read-out devices it would take about three years. As things are, call it . . . ten?
7. Do you think digital publishing complements paper publishing,
and does it add to sales of physical books?
Indeed I do. But I’ve made that pretty clear in the foregoing.
8. What about the future of reading in general?
I wonder about that. For most people reading isn’t much faster than listening, and ebooks will surely
soon offer a voice option. Hit a “voice” key and when you flip pages the computer starts reading to you. At
first its big draw would be that you could continue with the story while resting your eyes. I suspect that
the “eye-resting” function would grow longer and longer, especially for those of us who need reading
glasses. In the long run I see the voice option plus hyperlinks to whatever the author thinks might
interest his reader – plus whatever the reader thinks might interest the reader (Maps! Tables of
Organization! Film Clips from the era!) via some personal-agent software will make reading a dead-tree
book feel a bit like necrophilia, which is to say, getting intimate with a dead thing. But that is then, and this is
now. :)
So when it comes to reading in general, I think it will probably all be “voice reading” from a book-reading
device before too very long, with all sorts of icon management for navigation. Maybe there will continue
to be some kind of headline reading, but that’s probably just my conservative voice talking.
Thank you for taking this time with us.
Thank you.
