Last night, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller announced that their Liaden novels—which happen to be one of my all-time SF/fantasy series—will be available electronically via Baen’s Webscription service starting sometime in February.
This is very good news for a number of reasons. Their old ebook service was the now-defunct Embiid, which locked its books up in DRM encryption and then went out of business. I strongly expect the new Liaden ebooks to be encryption-free, given Baen’s historic disdain for DRM, and they should be reasonably priced, too. As far as I know, this will be the first time that Baen Webscriptions has listed another publisher’s books en masse since the deal to e-publish selected Tor books that fell through after only a couple of days.
This will go quite nicely with the impending “storyteller’s bowl” release of the draft of Fledgling.
Baen Books web subscriptions, book bundles for sale, and free library are absolutely A-1. The Universe magazine is a gem. Its overall fiction quality is the best that I have ever seen in a science-fiction or fantasy serial publication. It’s very inexpensive and would be a great gift for any friend or family member who likes to read top-quality science fiction online. Or just as a special treat for yourself. I’d like to see it succeed brilliantly, it deserves to do so.
Sara