Here is a thoughtful comment about Baen from the Idealog site:
Quote:
What's unusual about Baen Books isn't that they provide ebooks without DRM -- lots of publishers have done that. What distinguishes Baen is that they do not make their ebooks available through online retailers. The calculus seems to be that whatever they lose by not having a showcase at Amazon.com and elsewhere is more than made up by not having the retailers take a cut. It's a model that other publishers have moved away from. Ellora's Cave, for example, started out as an ebook-only publisher but later added printed editions. For a while -- as it was with Baen -- you needed to go to their website to download their ebooks but later decided to make them available at Amazon, B&N and other merchants.
Baen is a specialized imprint with a very narrow focus and a rather small number of titles, all but a few of which are mass market paperback originals. They were able to build up a fan base before ebooks were even popular, a fan base who knows how to get to their website and tech-savvy enough to download from a not especially user-friendly site.
What they're doing is very interesting, but it's not at all clear what lessons they can teach other publishers.
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I think that the Tor.com store may well begin by offering their books everywhere, but economic logic is going to in the end dictate exclusivity -for at least ebooks.
Again, I may be wrong about this but what exactly else can they offer that other retailers can't match?
Another model may be Pottermore- Amazon refers you but the sale happens at the Pottermore site. Again, though Pottermore had exclusivity -as to not only books, but other content .