[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Baen may be future: or he may just be an outlier.

Baen is a publisher that got bigger when other publishers got smaller. Whatever the reasons, other publishers should be falling over themselves to figure out how to apply its methods to their businesses.

It may just be that a publisher of speculative fiction, with an emphasis on military sf, who spends time cultivating a following in the techno-geek community, can get away with going DRM free.

Because techno-geeks are known for their devotion to copyright law.

Oh, wait. That's backwards: Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet. Why is it that the most-pirated genre is the one having the most commercial success with ebooks?

I note some of the passionate anti DRMists are also devoted followers of Baen.

And so are some of the avid pirates. Pretty much everyone who loves ebooks, looks to Baen as the company that's doing it right.

A big publishing company, with many lines of books, has different interests and must take a different approach.

Sure. Why aren't they figuring out which part of Baen's model *does* work for them--the non-DRM, the multiformat availability, the open forum to get feedback from customers, the bundled collection of ebooks for a discount, the e-arcs that cost twice as much as the finished book, the solid and growing backlist, the free sampler library, the CD-with-hardcover collections ... you seem to be saying that none of these would be any good for bigger publishing companies.

I didn't think a single one of Elfmark and Xenophon's choices were for general nonfiction or general fiction-the two biggest categories of books published out there.

How about "romance"--another huge category? There are more than a hundred DRM-free romance publishers, who all seem to be growing.

BeWrite is general fiction. So's BooksForABuck, and a couple of others on the lists. Double Dragon does general nonfic, and I've seen some others; I'll try to track some down. (They mostly have PDFs only.)

Publishers who offer nonfic w/o DRM:
Stenhouse Publishing: professional development books and videos by teachers and for teachers.
SynergEbooks nonfic & multi-genre fiction.
EReads.com, some of everything. The eBook Sale, similar. Clocktower Books. Hard Shell Word Factory. Lachesis Publishing. Whiskey Creek Press. Charles River Press.

There's no shortage of publishers who've decided they're better off without DRM. And strangely, they're not the ones issuing press releases that say they can't increase author royalties because fighting piracy costs too much.