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Originally Posted by Bob Russell
Even though I know where there are free ebooks, I would spend money on a lot more ebooks if there was a reliable, non-DRMd, format available with prices like paperbacks, i.e. books with a format that I could believe would always be around. Actually, even zipped HTML or RTF would suffice for my purposes.
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Bob:
Surely you know about Baen, the Baen Free Library, and (most important of all) Webscriptions. Baen's entire output, at reasonable prices -- $6/book or $15 for 6-8 books, at least 4 of which are new to (legal) bits. Never any DRM, professionally proofed, produced from the same files that go to the printers. Oh yeah... it's essentially the publisher's entire output for the month.
As for piracy... It just isn't a problem. There may well be folks out there stealing the books. From Baen's point of view, however, what
really matters is that (a) paper sales go
up when bits are released, and (b) total sales go up even more because they get the sales of bits as well as dead-tree-ware! From the point of view of a fan who wants to see authors well-compensated for their work, it's also important to know that the author's royalty on an electronic sale is quite comparable to a dead-tree-ware sale -- better than paperback or large-format paper, not quite as good as hardcover.
Meanwhile, various authors have volunteered some of their books (typically older books or beginnings of series) for the Baen Free Library. Completely legal, completely free, and still no DRM. And, by the way, they report that putting a book in the Free Library leads to a significant uptick in sales of the author's back-list. Especially for the very books that are available for free (and thosse series whose beginning is available for free).
As long as you're after science fiction and fantasy, your dream ebook supplier already exists.
Xenophon