From the Fifth Imperium...
Quote:
As people have been discovering for the last few days, the contents of this archive site has recently changed.
For ten years now, Baen has seen fit to provide free teaser/sampler CDs with many of its first edition hardbacks. They have been - and still should be - applauded for making much of their material available as no-cost samplers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many, many first-time readers have been swayed into buying Baen books due to having read something from one of the free CDs.
Baen is now on the verge of launching a new ebook distribution deal with an 'unnamed third-party'.
This third-party regularly crawls the web looking for ebooks it markets and, if found, matches their price to the new-found lower price.
Finding it free tends to knock the wind out of the ebook's sales (so to speak).
In a lot of ways, my personal belief is that Baen has now come to the conclusion that the free CDs are an experiment which has run its course.
After trading emails with Toni, I was going to retire the entire site (and may yet do so, depending on further events), but as an experiment, she's agreed to a compromise solution whereby only the directly browseable versions of the CD contents are no longer available.
Deleting those directories broke hundreds of remote links into my site.
I'm sorry for the inconvenience. It is rather nice to have the readable versions directly accessible from the web.
The full CD ISO files are, for the time being, still available, though.
-Joe
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