Baen eBooks are now available on the main Barnes and Noble website and can be purchased there or directly on your Nook e-Reader. Baen struck deals with Amazon, iBooks and Sony earlier in the year and this move should give more exposure to the brand.
Baen was founded in 1983 by Jim Baen and Simon & Schuster, where it became one of the major publishers in the science fiction field and an industry leader in innovation. Baen was one of the pioneers in electronic publishing, starting with a BBS and then with a website and chat room. The company then adopted ebooks, making it one of the earliest proponents of the medium. All Baen books were, and still are, DRM-free. In another first, Baen started Webscriptions, which were serialized versions of its books at reduced prices, which were sold 3 months in advance of print publications. Baen again was a pioneer when it introduced promotional CD-ROMs, which could be purchased or downloaded for free, containing all of an author’s works. If you can think of an innovative way to distribute ebooks, Baen probably did it first.
The company realizes they have to go where the customers are and not everyone is going to visit their website to buy books. The move to deal with Barnes and Noble gives them a wider audience in the US and UK.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.