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Sharing Doesn't Hurt

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the all-i-need-to-know-i-learned-in-kindergarten dept.

Freeptop writes "Here's a fun followup to an old slashdot article: Eric Flint just posted another Prime Palaver article on the Baen Free Library. In this article of his, he talks about the effects of posting his books for free on the library. Specifically, he uses his own royalty statements to show that sales for his books have gone up whenever he has made them available for free. As usual, Mr. Flint writes a well thought out article demonstrating the pointlessness of encrypting e-books, and this time, he has proof to back up his assumptions."

2 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another anecdote by ansible · · Score: 5, Informative

    I read "On Basilisk Station" by David Weber (also in the free library). I was immediately hooked, and ended up buying the rest of the series. That's 7 books purchased, when I got one for free.

    I think Weber did pretty well by me, and now I keep an eye out for other books of his. This is an author I had never even heard of, before I ran across the Baen Free Library.

    I'm slowly working through the rest of the free library. I haven't seen anything else that really grabbed yet, but no doubt I will end up spending some more cold, hard, cash.

    I'll purchase the electronic versions where available, because they are cheaper and in a non-proprietary format. I have a Rocket e-book reader, but never purchased books for that because I didn't want to be locked into a single reader device.

    Rock on Baen!

  2. Stephen King got a lot of money for his ebook by Cryogenes · · Score: 4, Informative
    ... Stephen King's experiment, where he allowed free download of his book and asked for a tiny donation in return. Very few of the people who downloaded the book paid for it and the project was scrapped.
    This is simply not true. King set a threshhold of 75%, no less. As long as 75% of downloaders were paying a dollar per chapter (not, let us note, a tiny amount but probably more than the hardcover price), he would continue. This worked for the first five chapters. The sixth chapter was still downloaded 112.000 times with 50% of people paying. Saying that "very few" people paid for their downloads is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. King took half a million dollars from his fans and then neither finished the project nor gave a refund.

    Saying that this experience proves that ebooks don't work is adding insult to injury.

    Do you believe in death after life?