In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons , to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free. I was just making a gesture.
Gestures are fine, but policies are better.
So, the next day, I discussed the matter with Jim again and it turned out he felt exactly the same way. Immediately, David Drake was brought into the discussion and the three of us refined the idea and modified it here and there. The Baen Free Library was born. This will be a place where any author can, at their own personal discretion, put up online for free any book published by Baen that they so desire. I'll have more to say about that in a moment.