Webscriptions

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Baen Webscriptions is an experiment in electronic publishing launched in 1999 by Jim Baen of Baen Books together with Webwrights. It is a business that sells ebooks of books published by Baen Books. Its primary goal was to increase sales of normal books at the time when majority considered that making an ebook availabe would crash the market for books. According to the declarations of people involved with this project[1], most notably Eric Flint [2], it has proven to be a significant success, increasing Baen's sales of printed books as well as generating additional income from ebooks, the success of the site has also been described by New York Times [3]. The project has been called 'innovative' by Wired [4] and New York Times [5] and met with generaly positive reception from many authors (ex.Charles Stross [6], David Drake [7]) and general public[8]. Baen currently is following the Webscriptions with another experiment in online publishing - an online subscription based sci-fi magazine, Jim Baen's Universe. Additionally, as part of the experiment, some of those ebooks are available free from the Baen Free Library, and all the books are free for disabled [9].

Webscriptions is different 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Each month, four to six as of yet unpublished works are made available for purchase as a group.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.

Note that while the books are only partially available ('Advanced Readers Copy'), 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. None of the ebooks has any Digital Rights Management parts. This has caused some concerns among certain publishers and authors. 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 Books' protests.[10] There are no current plans to revisit the situation.