Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Tor distributes ebook versions through Webscriptions.
|
Not anymore. For a while now, the (few) Tor books on Webscriptions have still been listed, but unavailable to buy, and no sign that they'll ever be coming back. |
They supposedly
were.
The original arrangement was between Tom Doherty at Tor and Jim Baen at Baen. It got to the point of being duly announced by both sides. But while Baen Books is an independent publisher, Tor isn't. Tom foresaw issues in publishing that would make it advantageous to Tor to be part of a larger company, and sold Tor to St. Martins Press in 1986. It's a unit of Holtzbrinck, who also own St. Martins Press, Farrar, Stroux and Giroux, and Henry Holt, and is under the Macmillan umbrella in the US.
Holtzbrinck nixed the deal because Baen did not apply DRM to Webscriptions offerings. Holtzbrinck subsequently got a new CEO that did not believe in DRM, and the deal was supposedly on again.
According to Tor Senior Editor Patrick Neilsen Hayden, it was a matter of dotting Is and crossing Ts and was in the hands of respective legal departments, but that was a while back. I have no idea what the hold up is. (I suspect Holtzbrinck is trying to establish a coherent digital policy that will extend to all of their imprints. Former Tor.com producer Pablo Defendi freely admitted that what he was doing had visibility well beyond Tor Books, and was being watched carefully by others in the Holtzbrinck corporate structure. The holdup may be Holtzbrinck making up it's mind which way to jump, with a possible feeling of "We're a major worldwide publisher. If we're going to sell ebooks, we should create our own channels to do it, and not use Baen's.")
The interesting thing for me is that Baen is quite happy to offer titles by other houses through Webscriptions, including places like Tor that are rather larger than Baen.
That sort of cooperation is sensible and refreshing. On a similar line, Pablo was adamant that Tor.com needed to be publisher agnostic. The intent was to build a community of readers interested in SF/fantasy, and any sort of SF and fantasy was grist for their mill, whether or not Tor published it.
______
Dennis