Recommendations for Benny

I'd recommend 11.03 Year Zero and 11.04 Dead Man's Switch first. Year Zero is a total continuity reboot where all you need to know is that Benny is an archaeologist out of her own space and time, trying to solve the mystery of a society that has outlawed history, and naturally archaeology. It's a great introduction to the character when she's not with the Doctor, and doesn't have the continuity baggage previous releases have (even when plots are stand-alone there's still one major plot arc or another). They're CD only at this point, no download option, but they are strong stories that don't have and previous continuity.

Dead Man's Switch leads into the Epoch box set, continuing the Year Zero theme. The other box sets are stand-alone, the only exception being Missing Persons, which functions as a loose follow-up to Epoch and bookends the series of box sets.

There's a charity release called Many Happy Returns that was released for Benny's 20th birthday back in 2012 (the same occasion Love and War was released for). It's an hour and a half long and touches upon the various points of Benny's Big Finish history, including an encounter with Iris Wildthyme. There is one major spoiler for a development from a 2008 release (it's in the Peter and Adrian Wall segment), but Lisa Bowerman says it in the extras for the first New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield box set (released in 2014).

It's more of a clean jumping on point where the previous continuity has little to no relevance. A few old characters return, but their re-introduction gives you all the context you need.

From Road Trip, the second box set, on, there's a loose tie-in novel. Unlike the novels that tied into an early season, these ones aren't essential to the audio stories but do offer a few more adventures. The only book that adds anything significant to the accompanying box set is Adorable Illusion for Missing Persons (listen to Missing Persons first to get a better understanding of the context for Adorable Illusion). The four books are available in physical form or download (download gives you a choice of formats based on what eReader you use).

When they were first made there wasn't the download rights in the contracts (the download system was started in 2008), so the main issue is that someone has to contact everyone who was involved in those stories and get their permission for the download rights for what they contributed. Other releases like this are the first season of Companion Chronicles, the first Sarah Jane Smith story (and only that release from that range), some of the early Bonus Releases like Real Time and the first three seasons of Gallifrey. Considering there are at least 60 of the CD only Benny releases and their digitization isn't a priority, there's not much movement with the process. James Goss is known to be pursuing this goal and commented about it a few times on the old forum, though there isn't any recent updates on progress.

I think while UK copyright law may be dumb the solution isn't that simple, though you may know better.

Big Finish only survives through licensing; if it got a reputation for improvising it might upset future license holders

It wouldn't be bad press because if done properly, with trust accounts set up, anyone who complained would be viewed as a big prissy. And prissies don't do well in the court of public opinion.

It would be an interesting exercise to try to figure out who is at issue. Compile a list of everyone on the CD only releases. See which people are on releases that are available for download. Narrow down to the list of people who haven't signed off on future releases.

One thing weird about the Bernice singles is the later seasons are from 2010. So how would downloads have not been a factor there? At the least it would be good to get downloads for dead man's switch and year zero which apparently is a good jump on point.

That's a pretty scandalous thing to suggest about Paul Cornell.

It would be hard to imagine any lawyer worth their salt taking the case.

"Let me get this straight. You had 4 lines in this audiobook, and the rest of the cast signed on? You're being offered fair market compensation? So all you're complaining about is that it's available as downloads instead of only cd's?"

Lawyer would want to smack the prissy for wasting their time.

If you've got people, and Scientologists, willing to go to court for petty reasons like similar names (people who share names with famous people, who were born before those people became famous, must go through hell when signing up for things) and other minor trivial or unreasonable things, so it's safe to assume someone will be ready to sue for breach of contract. No matter what the result, the bad press won't be good for Big Finish. I cite the Blogtor Who incident last year, where miscommunication caused rumours that the Tenth Doctor audios might not happen at all because of said miscommunication (Nick Brigg's withdrawn Facebook response didn't help matters).

Already got those two and am intending to get Series 1 as a bundle. It just will take a while as I'm in America so to get the CDs is a bit hectic

Months go by, still no Benny single release downloads. So unprofessional.