February 2010 Monthly Baen Bundle

[Howlingwolf]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Toni Weisskopf, editor of Baen, did warn people on Baen's Bar to make backups of their stuff several days prior to the changes to the Baen Free Library and the catalogue about a week or two ago, just before the BFL was gutted and the older monthly bundles had to be repriced due to some of the original selections being no longer available and some of the old purchase downloads disappeared due to author/agent demanding yanking of all the files.

I must admit I was shocked by the state of the BFL when I went to look at it a couple of days ago. I suppose we should be glad they waited so long before gutting everything Jim had worked so hard to build. Difficult to believe he's been gone over six years.

I don't think he would have liked the idea of getting into bed with Amazon either, but thanks to the sheer unbelievable stupidity of Apple and the mainstream publishers (not to mention their greed), Amazon now in effective control of the entire market.

Originally Posted by ATDrake

But certainly it's going to have to be a holiday project for many of us.

I downloaded the bundles as I went along. I just have to sort out 324 files now. Rename, identify and remove duplicates, etc....

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Howlingwolf

I must admit I was shocked by the state of the BFL when I went to look at it a couple of days ago.

Editor Weisskopf has said that they intend to return a lot of books to the BFL, but they have to make new "enhanced" editions with extra content or whatever to sell at Amazon, etc. to differentiate them from the bare-bones "first editions" which they'll then be able to offer in the BFL without getting some sort of re-pricing/royalty payment hit from Amazon as a penalty.

But some of the books flat-out won't be returning because the rights have expired and the authors/agents have reclaimed them to try and sell themselves. I wish I'd gone through and done a less haphazard collection of all the books a couple of months ago, since checking against the list of stuff that used to be there, I seem to be missing/unable to find my copies of some of them*. Oh well, I wasn't reading most of them anyway.

* Every so often I resolve to do better and more organized backups. And then I don't do it.

[Howlingwolf]

oops...

The page refresh demon strikes again


I must admit if I'd known they were going to start stripping the library I'd have been tempted to grab the entire thing but I haven't visited the Bar recently so the whole thing was a complete surprise to me.

I know what you mean about the 'organised backups'

Our eBook library contains 1557 separate volumes including a mixture of purchased, free stuff from Baen and others, and public domain. It seems a lot but it's been built up over several years by two adults and a teenager with very different reading tastes.

I keep them in separate directories under Library, (\ADE, \Baen, \Fictionwise, etc.), and that's all the 'organisation' they get

Backups consist of a simple incremental file backup.

It seems to be working so far...


EDIT:

Those 1557 files do NOT contain all the new stuff from Baen yet

[Papi47]

pm to ATDrake

[ATDrake]

Code PMed to Papi47.

[Papi47]

redeemed and holding new certificate for next person.

[mobmind]

Originally Posted by bfollowell

Has anyone heard anything about them turning off downloading? I'm assuming they're just turning off their purchasing servers but that the items we've "purchased" should still be available for some time to come, correct?

I'd hate to think we all spent the better part of two days getting all of these old bundles, only to find out that the download servers are going down soon too and we won't have time to download everything.

I'm sure (I hope) that I'm worrying over nothing.

- Byron

You may know this, but in case you don't. If you go to the "Your Account" link on the top right of Baen's page and then "Order History" it will list all your orders/bundles and you can choose to download an entire bundle in one zip file. I actually grabbed everything that way as I completed my orders. It makes for a quick and dirty download of everything if you're concerned about cloud retention. I just slung them all in dated folders 1002, 1109 etc. to sort out later. I don't trust much of anything to just the cloud.

On those lines I also downloaded the entire Free Library in October sometime, which seems to have amounted to 111 separate books based on my saved folder. I wonder what the official position is regarding further distribution of those books? It seems to be accepted that the free CDs remain freely distributable. Maybe a torrent of the Free Library would also be distributable?

[Howlingwolf]

I doubt it. As far as I know the BFL was never redistributable. The CDs were a 'special' case if that's the right word.

[ATDrake]

Baen always asked people to send others directly to their official site to get the Free Library books, rather than pass them around themselves on the internet.

Even the Baen CDs come with a requirement that the entire CD has to be redistributed at once, and not broken up into individual books to send to others (though apparently it was okay for the 5th Imperium to just put the entire CD online and have people browse through the directories like they were looking at the CD on their own computer to pick the books they wanted).

[scottken]

Pm to Papi47

[Papi47]

Code sent to scottken

[scottken]

Code received, but bundle now shown as "Not Currently Available," so the feeding frenzy may well be over.

So I'm holding the code, but unable to redeem.

[Papi47]

Yes piperclassique said the same on another thread. I now have a tbr that is probably too large for my kindle!!!!!!!!!!!!

[scottken]

Oh yeah, no complaints -- I have far too much to read. I was just surprised to log in today and see so much redeeming still going on yesterday and into today. So I missed a few -- nothing to grouse about give how over-generous Baen has been with these bundles all along.

When you think of all the self-pub stuff eating up the amazon lists (that got up there through free promotion), it's no wonder they need to change strategy, when they've got a backlist this strong that could well be generating more $ for their writers with a more current marketing approach.