tlb wrote:I was hoping for a new CD with the book; only have through Mission of Honor in searchable form, because I have not purchased the e-Arc versions.
JohnRoth wrote:The story I heard on that is that Amazon didn't like it; Been had to decimate the old free library to get their books on Amazon.
Louis R wrote:Unlikely, since Eastern Front was years before the Amazon deal.
Nor was the Free Library a sticking point in and of itself. Problem with the Library was that any book in it would automatically be free on Amazon - they do automated price matching - when authors were still getting a fair bit of revenue from those books on the Baen site [strangely, a lot of people like to go back and buy a book they've already read for free, just because]. Since there was no way to work around the price matching, and the whole point of the exercise was to start getting revenue via Amazon and the other big-box ebook outlets from the hordes of readers who were never able to figure out that they could get a better deal buying direct, most writers decided to pull most or all of their works from the Library at least until they could cobble together a Second Edition that could go up for sale while the original was in the Library.
Actually, according to Toni, the CDs were dropped because, like the Free Library, they had served their purpose, which was to promote ebooks and grow the market. Marketing money is now being spent on other things, and I wouldn't expect to see it done again, except maybe as an anniversary issue for WebScriptions, or something of similar significance. And the 25th Anniversary of WebScriptions is still 6 years off.
That's more or less what I'd heard - Amazon refused to suspend their price matching, so the Free Library had to go. You'll notice that the new Free Library only applies to ebooks - all the dead tree versions on it require payment (or at least the ones I've checked.)