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Baen Books Expands Fair-Use-Friendly e-Book Program
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
LUCHS.AT

You are about to start playing with a CD-ROM that has fairly extraordinary content. As of this writing it includes twenty-two UNENCRYPTED novels in several formats, the ten Honor Harrington Novels, 3 Honor Harrington Anthologies and 9 novels by friends of Honor, and by the time of distribution it may well contain more. (More than twenty novels for free—and with no stupid codes to work around. Think of that.) The reason for the plethora of formats is to try to please the people who want to read the novels on their Palm Pilots or other text-specialized palm-sized devices. There are also Rich Text Format versions of all the novels, which can be read by several applications -- including Wordpad, MS Word and most word processors -- and .doc files, which are MS Word specific. (For RTF, in Microsoft Word: use the Open command, then log onto your “Honorverse” CD-ROM, specify .rtf format, load the file: [FileOpen, log onto Honorverse disk, click on Rich Text Format extension on drop-down menu] double-click on the file you want.]

"Baen Books will bind a CD-ROM into the October 2002 hardcover edition of *War of Honor,* the latest volume in David Weber's epic Honor Harrington space-opera. The CD will contain at least 22 complete novels, all in open formats like html and RTF, with the fair-use-friendly admonishment "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold." Included on the disk are the entire Honor Harrington series to date, as well as other titles from the Baen line, including Keith Laumer's *Retief!* and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's *Fallen Angels*.

Baen has been a banner-carrier for fair-use in electronic publishing, shipping text and html files that can be played on a multitude of devices. Other publishers have chosen to publish their material in copy-controlled formats that make it impossible to legally loan or resell the titles you purchase, are locked to a specific device, can't play on every operating system, and occasionally lock out assistive technology like the screen-readers employed by the blind."

See the Baen homepage for more information.
(More: Luchs.at News Source)
2002 © Baen CD ROM Library.

Dan