I was sad to learn today that Jim Baen died yesterday after having a serious stroke. If you’ve never heard of him, Jim Baen was a founding partner of Baen Books. Most of my Baen collection is military scifi, and many of the best (at least in my opinion) authors of that genre were discovered by Baen. I became a big fan of Jim Baen when he started promoting the idea of ebooks without DRMs because they got in the way of the reader. Baen has released a large portion of their library for free online (including March Upcountry which is still one of my favorite books) with even more available on CDs included with many of their hardcovers. They also have new releases available for paid download, but I always appreciated the idea that you might as well give away the first couple books of some of these series for free because people are less prone to walk into a bookstore and buy book ten of a series. It seems rare that someone in a position like his really gets it and has the vision to explore what ebooks could do for both the reader and the business. David Drake wrote an obituary for him that is available here that I recommend reading.