text: Many good points. Personally I don't feel any moral obligation to pay an author if a friend lends me one of his books, or if I sign out one of his books from the library, and I don't view free downloads any differently. The end result is that if I like the author I will support them in the future, and if I don't...well, I don't. The book was free, and I don't feel bad about it. I gave the author a shot, and that's probably more than I could say if the initial book hadn't been free. If you read the post on the main page of the Baen Free Library it is made clear by Eric Flint why the Library exists, and he doesn't even remotely hint that you should feel obligated to do anything. Free books are free. If you really want to show your support, how about recommending the author to all your friends?
  If you're referring to The Dance of Time, it's out and available. There's something titled Belisarius I: Thunder at Dawn scheduled for September release, but it'll apparently be a compilation of the first two books in the series (according to Amazon), so it doesn't really count as a "new" book, per se. Puzzled me at first, since the existing books are definitely a complete story.
  There is also a novella in The Warmasters collection. I'm not sure where it fits in the continuity of the series. Matter of fact, it's the only new thing in the collection. The other two pieces are reprints of David Drake and David Weber pieces. The only real complaints I have about Baen are that it is sometimes hard to know whether or not something is completely new. For example, The David Weber book Bolo! only has one new piece (which is actually a prequel to his novel Old Soldiers) but you can't really tell that With Your Shield is the new story without looking at the book's copyright info. Secondly, for a long time it was hard to tell if a particular book was part of a series or where it went in a series. They have actually improved quite a bit in this area recently.
  I like a pretty diverse field of stuff that includes pretty much every fiction genre, but I find that I usually have favorite individual books rather than favorite authors. As far as fantasy series' go my favorite authors are probably George RR Martin and Steven Erikson. In general the books I enjoy the most have strong character development, and often clever or unexpected plots (if that helps).
  Anyways folks, thanks for all your suggestions so far! I have a big long list written up, and lots of reading to do binzer
  I doubt this will happen. If you look at the Tor releases so far, all of the books they are releasing are by authors who have released novels online for free. Erikson hasn't done that, so I don't know if he'd be willing to let him release it. More on topic, I have a question about something. I purchased the ebook version of The Best of Jim Baen's Universe. It came with a free download of the iso for the promotional disk that the hardcover originally came with. Do they do this with all of their promotional disks, or was that a one time thing?