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I don't have an issue paying normal prices for Baen ebooks, for that matter I don't have an issue buying baen books at Amazon, I already buy the non-Baen Weber books there.
It is the end of an era and it does make me a bit sad. Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, I was reasonably active (mostly lurking, though posting some) on the Baen web board run by Arnold Bailey. At it's peak, it was a system that had several authors very active on the system, frequently posting little snippets of up coming books. It was a lot of fun. Eventually, most of the authors stopped posting (not surprising since it was a big time sink) and most of the moderator tasks were turned over to fans. It wasn't much longer before, IMPO, it became very cliquish, as many online webboards become. I pretty much stopped going to the webboard not long after Baen died.
The idea of the websubscription was one of the better ideas that I've seen over the years from the standpoint of building a customer base. One could say that Jim Baen was a true trail blazer for ebooks. It might be interesting to see how many people who were read ebooks prior the Amazon kindle, bought books from Baen. I would not be surprised if that was the number one source for legal, non public domain ebooks from 2000 to 2007.
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