Jim Baen, publisher and editor, passed away June 28th following a massive stroke. Baen Books website posted a brief notice. David Drake has a longer obituary. I used to buy a ton of Baen paperbacks a few years ago, especially the paperback magazines (I first read Vernor Vinge’s short story, “The Ungoverned,” in one of these), but in the last decade of so none of the writers in their line appealed to me, nor did the covers; I never really read that much military sf. I also remember meeting Jack Vance’s Cugel character in Baen’s editions of some of Vance’s books. Recently Baen also was a force in promoting unencrypted web versions of books from their line, and proved this model as a viable and ethical business model. Quite a few Prometheus Award-winning sf writers appeared in Baen editions, including L. Neil Smith and James P. Hogan, as well as F. Paul Wilson.