Oh, bless you Baen Ebooks…

…for your ARC drops today. Ring of Fire IV, a book short stories in John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, and a new Leary-Mundy book from David Drake.  It’s like the publisher knew that February was pure Hell on Earth for me. Or that I’m still going to be white-knuckling March.

6 thoughts on “Oh, bless you Baen Ebooks…”

  1. I stopped buying the ARC’s last year. I thought that if I’d paid more than double what the final product would cost, a product that has a zero reproduction cost, I ought to get a copy without the typos and such. I corresponded with Baen about being provided with a final version of the many ARC’s I had purchased and got a raspberry blown back at me. There answer was “lots of people buy both, so we’re not changing anything”.

    “Thanks for your support of Baen Books. We have many customers who buy both the unedited eARC version and the final format of our books. We have no plans at this time to give customers a complimentary copy of the final version with purchase of the eARC.

    Thanks for your support of Baen Books.

    Regards,
    Jenny Cunningham
    Baen Ebooks Web Team”

    From that point on I schooled my impatience and just waited for the publication versions. They can support their advances to authors some other way.

    1. Heck, I would even mind if the e-ARCs were even more expensive, if they automatically upgraded to the final version. It’s just inconvenient to have to buy it twice.

        1. If you wait for the book’s official release, you can get it for US$18, along with every other ebook Baen releases that month, which will include at least four newly released ebooks, plus books they just released in mass-market paperback format and other older books. You get 6-9 books for your $18.
          (Of course, if you buy every monthly bundle, as I do, eventually each month’s new-to-MMPB titles will be ones you already own from their initial releases. So the effective price per book will be up to $4.50, instead of $2-$3. That’s still a great bargain.)
          You can read more at http://www.baen.com/categories/monthly-baen-bundles.html (warning: as I write the first para does not reflect recent changes to Baen’s monthly cycle).
          So you can think of e-ARCs as costing $33 and coming with a bunch of other ebooks … HTH

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