Webscriptions

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Baen Webscriptions is an experiment in electronic publishing. It is a business that sells ebooks published by Baen Books. It is unique from most other online ebook selling ventures in that books are sold individually as well as in a bulk, serialized nature. Webscriptions is owned and operated by Webwrights, a company which also runs Baen Books' website and Baen's Bar.

Each month, four to six as of yet unpublished works are made available for purchase as a group. The books are released incrementally. Three months before their official release date, only the first half of the books are available for download. Two months before their official release, the first three quarters of the books are available. The complete books are available for download a month before they are released in paper form.

You may purchase a monthly subscription at any point in time. If you purchase a month that has already been released, the complete books are available for immediate download.

Note that while the books are only partially available, the only download format is HTML, however once the books are complete, they can be downloaded in multiple ebook formats including Rocketbook, RTF, Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, and HTML.

Additionally, as part of the experiment, some of those ebooks are available free from the Baen Free Library.

Tor Books began making books available via Webscriptions in March 2006, but pulled it within days because of pressure from the owning group, Holtzbrinck because of concerns regarding the lack of DRM, over Tor Book's protests. There are no current plans to revisit the situation.