Link Highlight: Free Books!

Many of which are worth considerably more than you pay for them.

This week's link highlight is the Baen Free Library.

This is a free, completely legal, easy-to-use digital library of over 100 published sci-fi/fantasy books. They can be downloaded or read online, and in multiple formats including HTML.

The publisher (Baen books) is a large sci-fi/fantasy press. The founder (who has since passed away), felt that putting up the first book of a series was a good way to get people to buy the rest of the series, often including that first book. From all the press I've seen, he was right. Judging by my present-day sci-fi/fantasy collection, either I'm smack dab in the center of their target market of he was a genius.

The old marketing tradition of "the first taste is free" is now applied to almost all Baen books - you can read the first few chapters of any recent Baen book online, generally starting several months before it is published. (This is in addition to the 100+ free books.)

I think that I first ran across the free library thanks to Sluggy Freelance. A sluggy fan who is also an author (John Ringo) published a book with a giant tank named "Bun Bun" (after one of the main Sluggy characters), and Pete Abrams (who writes Sluggy Freelance) put up a link on the Sluggy Freelance home page to the book.

I know that among the early books I read there were Bedlam Boyz (Ellen Guon), 1632 (Eric Flint), On Basilisk Station (David Weber), With the Lightnings (David Drake), and An Oblique Approach (Eric Flint/David Drake).

The free library led me to the "Collected driblets of Baen" http://jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com/ which led to me picking up several non-Baen authors.

Either the free library or John Ringo (one might easily argue both) led me to Heather Alexander, one of my favorite musicians.

I've bought more hardcover Baen books than I have hardcovers from every other fiction publisher combined.

Baen has continued to expand slowly into the digital world - you can now buy electronic copies of their new releases for less than the price of a paperback book. You can buy many of their older books too - including some that I've spent years looking for in bookstores without success.

So be warned: if you venture into the worlds of fantasy, you may never escape.