Thanks to Jefferson Barbour at Virginia Beach Books Examiner

Though sales of ebooks and ereader devices are rising, DRM has proven to be a problem at times. In January, popular ebook retailer Fictionwise had a dilemma on its hands when one of its DRM providers terminated its contract, thereby causing many customers to lose access to their legally purchased ebooks and Fictionwise scrambling to find a solution. While it was commendable of Fictionwise to work on their customers’ behalf to find a solution, the DRM was still undeniably a problem. More recently, Amazon.com angered many customers by deleting purchased copies of 1984 from their Kindles. Though the customers were given refunds and Amazon revealed that the copies were published on the Kindle store by a company who didn’t have the right to do so, many customers were still bitter.

With all this in mind, there is a publisher that is going against the industry norms regarding DRM encoded ebooks. Baen Books, a science fiction/fantasy publisher, offers DRM free ebooks for sale on its website. An exploration of Baen’s website reveals that its ebooks are available in a wide variety of formats, including Epub, Mobipocket/Kindle, and Microsoft Reader. Baen, the literary home of such popular sci-fi/fantasy novelists as Marion Zimmer Bradley, P.N. Elrod, and Robert A. Heinlin, also price their ebooks lower than the current industry standard of $9.99. A perusal of the site revealed ebooks for as little as $4.00. They also have a service called webscriptions, whereby ebooks are offered in serialized form before the actual release date. Baen also offers physical copies of its books for sale. These sales are conducted via links to third party retailers such as Amazon.com.

More details here

I had never heard of this company before, but I’ll have to check them out. I don’t really read ebooks, but that’s because  I don’t want to shell out the money for something like a Kindle.

Do you read ebooks or do you prefer paper and ink copies?