Sharing Doesn't Hurt

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."

Comments

Imagine that!

[kgarcia]

You provide your customers with a free, easy (and legal) way of previewing your products, and they feel compelled to buy them. Who would have thought?

Re:Imagine that!

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

What would happen if the preview were as good as the for-sale product?

Dead-tree books are still a first-rate display technology. If reading on the web were as portable and easy, I wonder if there'd still be a boost in sales.

Re:Imagine that!

[Jason Earl]

I am rather new to this whole e-book technology (I have only had my visor for a couple of months), but I have pretty much decided that dead-tree editions have gone the way of the dodo for me. I like reading on my visor. My visor is much lighter than a hardback, the display is comfortable, and with a sprinboard Compact Flash adaptor I can carry around a ridiculous amount of books.

That being said I still think that Baen has the right idea. I hadn't ever read anything by Eric Flint, and now I am completely hooked. Unfortunately, you can't simply download the latest two books in the Belisaurius series. You have to purchase them. In fact, you can't even purchase them outright. You have to purchase a set of four e-books for the princely sum of $10. Even if I don't like any of the other books that's a pretty good deal. It's certainly worth being able to carry the entire series around with me without looking like a doofus. And by bundling the books this way Baen might get me hooked on another of their authors.

That's what I want, and I am not paying for anything less. I am willing to rely on Project Gutenberg, individual authors, and Baen until the rest of the publishers figure that out.

Re:Imagine that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, except for the few years part, there already is a free, easy, and legal way to preview the boxster. I believe they call it a test drive.

Re:Imagine that!

[NoData]

I also wonder what his attitude would be if, for instance, Ace started publishing paperbacks of one of the books he's put up at the Free Library for $1 less than Baen and not paying him any royalties.

Providing a sample of art for FREE is very different than profiteering off of somebody else's work. This is one of TWO (and only two) circumstances where I think copyright law has any legitimacy. 1) you shouldn't be allowed to make money on someone else's back. 2) you shouldn't misrepresent a piece of work (e.g. as your own, a manipulated version as the author's, etc.)

So...

[sean23007]

Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.

But wait- that means that authors would have to start... writing better... what about... how come....? Pffft, all this "library" does is promote healthy competition and publicize good works by unknown authors, which effectively ruins the monopoly held by the big names in the business. So actually, this library with its free postings does lower sales... of works that aren't as good.

Baens is a great site

[iansmith]

I have been a subsriber at Baen for almost two years now. It's great to get books before they are published, cheaper than for paper, and I always have something to read (with my PDA).

They need more press, I can't think of any other publisher that has done as much to promote unencrypted and even free ebooks.

I think the biggest problem is..

[Sc00ter]

That unlike most consumer goods, like VCRs or portable radios, is that when you don't like them within 30 days you bring them back to the store and get a refund (most of the time). Sure, there's sometimes conditions, like you have to keep the box, but that's reasonable.

Why is this not true for books/cds/software, because they assume that you copied them. This is what needs to change. If I hear a song on the radio that I like, go and buy the CD and the whole rest of the CD sucks, then I should be able to bring it back to the store and get a refund.

Re:I think the biggest problem is..

[GigsVT]

e take advantage of this and use B&N as a personal library. I

People do this. It came up on the "Living below your means" board on the Motley Fool. There was a huge debate (flamefest) over whether it was ethical.

Now, before you Napsterites respond...

[d.valued]

..there is a CRUCIAL difference between what this author did, the Smashing Pumpkins asked for on "Machina 2: The Machines of the Gods" (their last album which was released as 50 acetates to good friends and one Chicago radio station which MP#'d it and let it roll), the way the Grateful Dead dealt with bootlegs (trade 'em, don't sell 'em I think was the gist of it) and what a lot of file-traders do with Metallica, Boobie Spears, et al.

This guy owned the copyright to his works and chose to share. I like that. Now, the labels and/or the artists (depending on who owns the copyright) chose NOT to share.

Now, I've never used any such services, mainly because, quite frankly, most US music sucks thanks to the fact we have only five real record labels, and I prefer my criminality to be more significant, like d/l'ing DeCSS or otherwise defeating copyright controls.

It'll be funny to see record companies respond

[Omerna]

I imagine it'll be something about how it doesn't matter what happens for BOOKS, and how they plan to keep trying to shut down all the file sharing programs anyway. Afterall, ACTUAL profit is less important than the CONCEPT that you're giving away your product (intellectual property, you know) to whoever wants it.

How many times will this have to be proven before somebody (other then /.ers) gets it?

Can we really draw conclusions?

[AKAJack]

I mean, the sample size is pretty small - one book. It's promising to see this happening, but I hesitate to jump to the end result of "it works". Then again, that's books and the hot topic of discussion isn't about books.

Even if the music companies are lying about everything else music sales are down and the actual reasons people are giving is that they download their music for "free" now instead of buying it. Yes, I've seen the survey results from the inside.

I guess my point is that this probably doesn't apply to music.

Re:Like the idea...

[malibucreek]

To quote...

"The ideas are free... but the median can be charged for."

So give away books that are really good, or ones that really suck. It's just the ones in the middle people have to pay for.

Of course there's the most obvious way to benefit:

[Otto]

Series.

Most books I (and others I've spoken with) really enjoy tend to be parts of a series of novels. Trilogies, etc.

If you really want to avoid obscurity, make your first book as free as possible, sell it on the cheap, give the text away freely on the internet in every conceivable format, etc. Then sell the rest of the books via traditional sales methods.

Get 'em addicted, then jack up the cost. Hey, it works. Ask your local drug dealer. (What, you don't think books are addictive??!?)

yeah but.

[MisterBlister]

This guy is virtually unknown to the general public. Does anyone out there think this system would extend well to established authors (or musicians)? As a counter-point, I'd bring up 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.

My basic point is that this guy is getting free advertising by releasing the book for free, which is resulting in some more sales than he would have gotten if nobody had ever heard of him...But the situation is much different when you're talking about an established very well-known author..And the same goes for music. MP3s given away for free by small bands may increase their market..But does anyone hear Britney Spears for the first time on MP3 and think wow, that's great..lets go buy the album? Of course not..And the the RIAA/other publish associations know this, and will quickly discount this guy's story.

Re:yeah but.

[nyet]

From the article:

As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.

Why? In most cases, simply because they don't really know anything about the writer and aren't willing to spend $7 to $28 just to experiment. So, they keep buying those authors they are familiar with.

Which is the whole point... "big" name authors (or musicians/bands/actors/screenwriters/songwriters) stay big name BECAUSE of this effect, NOT because they are inherently better.

That's why branding works so well in an inefficient market; it depends heavily on the consumers' imperfect information regarding what competitors exist.

I would argue that supporting the SMALLER guy and making it harder for the more established content producers to maintain their lock on the market is a happy side effect.

I know the RIAA/MPAA would disagree, but in this case, it helps both the producer and the consumer.

Re:yeah but.

[Savage Henry Matisse]

As a counter-point, I'd bring up 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.

In the final reckoning, King had somewhere in the ballpark of 71% payemnt (i.e. 71% of those who downloaded kicked him a buck, as per agreement), and made something like a $400,000 *profit.* The projected wasn't "scrapped" at all, but rather back-burnered in favor of other projects (which he is contractually obligated to complete.)

Your major point-- that big names hardly need to benefit from the name-building power of distributing freebies-- still stands, but the King facts were wrong.

Re:yeah but.

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

This guy is virtually unknown to the general public. Does anyone out there think this system would extend well to established authors (or musicians)? As a counter-point, I'd bring up 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.

False. For those who've forgotten the facts (i.e. you) here's what happened: in the fall of 2000, Stephen King offered up every chapter of his book-in-progress "The Plant" for free download, with the caveat that if at least 75% of the people downloading each chapter didn't pay $1, he wouldn't release the next one. (The PDFs were encrypted to prevent uncounted freeloaders.)

He released 7 chapters. That means over 75% of people paid him the buck for 6 times in a row. "Very few" indeed. And this was hundreds of thousands of people, despite the fact that almost no one had a dedicated e-book reader at the time and, well, e-books suck. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars off this half-a-book. (Admittedly, this is less than he makes for his paper novels.) And despite the fact that he RAISED THE PRICE in the middle!! (To $2 AFAICT.) Many, many people paid $13 for half of a serialized mystery novel that there was a very real chance they would never get to finish (as indeed happened), even though they didn't have to pay a cent to get it.

[Caveat: I believe King fudged the numbers to allow slightly less than 75% pay rate at one point. OTOH, there were very very widespread reports of corrupted downloads, so many of the "freeloaders" were actually people who downloaded once, paid, and then didn't want to pay again just to download a working copy.]

My basic point is that this guy is getting free advertising by releasing the book for free, which is resulting in some more sales than he would have gotten if nobody had ever heard of him...But the situation is much different when you're talking about an established very well-known author..And the same goes for music. MP3s given away for free by small bands may increase their market..But does anyone hear Britney Spears for the first time on MP3 and think wow, that's great..lets go buy the album? Of course not..And the the RIAA/other publish associations know this, and will quickly discount this guy's story.

First of all, I think you're wrong again; except for a very small number of artists, nobody really has saturation exposure, particularly amongst people who don't listen to pop radio or MTV. Plus you're forgetting that the record labels *pay* very very large amounts of money to *get* these artists songs to be played on pop radio/MTV.

Although no, I don't expect the RIAA will be swayed by this or any other evidence, even the evidence that Napster fueled the largest increase in CD sales in history and that shutting it down directly caused the massive drop they are currently whining about. That's because the big record labels realize that even if they would initially make more money under such a system, they would lose their power. The reason artists sign with the big 5 is that the big 5 have a oligopoly on all the distribution channels; if you add a new distribution channel that cannot be easily controlled, then artists will sign with smaller labels that give them better contracts, or not sign with a label at all.

The sad thing is, even if such a system did decrease the sales of the top few artists (or even the total revenues of the music/publishing industry), that is still not a reason not to move toward it. The only reason we have copyright laws is to encourage as many artists as possible to go into the career of producing valuable art for the rest of us. This motivation is explicitly stated in the Constitution. The copyright laws are *not* there to maximize the earnings of the top artists or of the record labels, only to ensure that the largest amount of music is available to the public.

In other words, if a new system has the effect of increasing the number of people who can make a decent living creating art while decreasing the incomes of the top stars already in the industry, then by the criteria set forth in the Constitution our copyright laws ought to promote that system over the current one. Instead, all the evidence is that the way those laws are currently written prevents rather than promotes their stated purpose.

Re:yeah but.

[Arrgh]

I have categorically stopped buying CDs unless I download and listen to the artist/album first.

Not so much out of principle, but practicality. When I hear a song I like on the radio, I fire up my favourite P2P client and download everything I can find by the artist. If I like a significant fraction of the songs, I figure out which album has a bunch of good songs on it, and buy the CD.

I don't like how 128kbps sounds, and I can only play audio CDs in the car--both make it impractical for me to really make good use of downloaded music, except as background noise while using the computer.

Re:yeah but.

[Dr. Awktagon]

As a counter-point, I'd bring up 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.

Not true...

1) his "donation" was actually pretty high, considering the number of pages you got (I believe it was $1 per part, with like 12 parts planned).

2) he made (as in, clear profit after expenses) about half a million. He considered it a success, though not as much income as his print books (obviously.. and he botched a few things, including lack of notification when new parts were put up.)

He wrote a letter to NYT or whoever had written an article about it, describing how he felt it was a success. But of course the big publisher didn't print his letter.

As for your point that this only helps unknown authors, I have to wonder, so what? Let's treat music and writing and art like any other industry, where there are few or no "superstars". Sure there are high-profile lawyers, doctors, programmers, etc., but they don't make a large percentage of the profits in their respective industries. We should support smaller artists, so that being a recording musician isn't like playing the lottery, it's like having a normal job.

I've also heard people saying that sharing hurts the little guy and not the big guy, so I guess it's a matter of opinion.

Re:yeah but.

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

And you're forgetting that the radio stations are now required to pay back the RIAA and record labels for every song played, per listener . The streaming radio stations are required to pay double the rate. Trust me, the RIAA is well into the black on their outlay for payola to the radio stations.

Very interesting point, which I'd failed to consider. Actually it is perhaps for that very reason that the record labels don't actually pay the radio stations directly for song placement, but instead pay brokers millions and millions of dollars which they then use to pay the radio stations off.

The reason I know that is that it comes from a truly fascinating Wall Street Journal article (unfortunatly not available online to the general public; I'm gonna see if I can't scare up a copy through Lexis-Nexis) about the millions of dollars poured down the drain by one of the big 5 in an effort to make some chick by the name of Carly Hennessy the next Britney Spears. I think in the end they spent something like $4 or $5 million on her and ended up with roughly 1,000 CD sales and a Wall Street Journal article to show for it. (It may go without saying, but her music SUCKED and I mean was AWFUL; here's a link to her album on CDNow where you, like me, can get a taste of how terrible it is. And I actually LIKE Britney Spears, or at least can appreciate what's well crafted about her good songs.)

Ah; OK, so apparently L-N (or at least the academic version) doesn't get the full text of the Journal, but the piece was syndicated out to the Houston Chronicle in abbreviated form. Although...they don't offer free access to archives either, so I'll just exercise that fair use thing and give some excerpts.

First off, I was wrong; they only wasted $2 mil on her, but then again it was only 378 copies of Ultimate High that got sold. Here's the opening of the story (as excerpted by the Chronicle):

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. - Eighteen-year-old recording artist Carly Hennessy is packing up her small apartment. Her promotional posters will go into storage, and the beige rental couch will be returned. A weight-control message that the slender teen scrawled in marker on the refrigerator - "NO, U R FAT" - will be wiped clean.

For two years, Vivendi Universal SA's MCA Records paid the rent while Hennessy prepared for pop stardom. And that's not all: The label so far has spent about $ 2.2 million to make and market her new album, an upbeat pop recording called Ultimate High. "Some people just struggle," she says. "I was very, very lucky."

Not lucky enough. Ultimate High was released in stores nationwide three months ago. So far, it has sold only 378 copies - amounting to about $ 4,900 at its suggested retail price. In many other industries, this would be considered an extraordinary bomb. But in today's troubled music business, it's routine. Of the thousands of albums released in the United States each year by the five major record companies, fewer than 5 percent become profitable, music executives say.

I mostly included that because the "U R FAT" part is funny. Here's the music industry's sob story (notice how it's more sophisticated than the "Napster and CD burning are eating our sales" PR crap that is trotted out for consumer-oriented press):

Music executives also say it is more difficult to launch new acts. Among the reasons: Deregulation of the radio industry in 1996 has led station owners to consolidate into a few big companies, which are under pressure to maximize profits and pull songs off the air that aren't instant nationwide hits.

Superstores such as Wal-Mart, which stock fewer titles than traditional music stores, are the fastest-growing segment of music retailing, making it costlier and more competitive for record companies to secure prime shelf space.

As a result, industry executives estimate that major-label releases must on average sell about 500,000 copies just to break even. Last year, of the 6,455 new albums distributed in the United States by major labels, only 112 have sold at least that many, according to SoundScan, which monitors music sales.

Golly, if only there were some way for those poor big 5 to break the stranglehold on music distribution caused by the Wall-Mart/radio syndicate oligopoly! If only there were a way to reach customers directly, or to encourage the development of new radio stations, or to allow individuals access to more promotional music I'm sure the record labels would jump all over it.

Overall music sales were down 5 percent last year - the steepest decline in a decade.

After the largest yearly increase in a decade the previous year. What happened last year? Napster was shut down. What happened the previous year? Napster ramped from almost 0 users to 80 million registered users. Hmm.

Hennessy, a native of Dublin, Ireland, released her debut musical effort, Carly's Christmas Album, in Ireland at age 10, after performing in Europe as Little Cosette in Les Miserables...

"The most beautiful voice you'd ever heard - and she would have ended up singing in the bath," says her father, Luke Hennessy, a real estate investor.

More local color.

The executives offered her a six-album contract, under which Hennessy would get a $ 100,000 advance for her first album, plus $ 5,000 a month in living expenses while the album was being made. The label would own the recorded music and would front the cost of recording and promotion.

For Hennessy to make any more money, the label would first have to recoup its advance, its recording costs and half the cost of any music videos, as well as her living expenses - meaning the album would have to sell between 500,000 and 700,000 copies, MCA says.

At that point, Hennessy could collect royalties amounting to 15 percent of sales. But she would still owe a cut to a phalanx of producers and managers, as well as other record-company fees - leaving her with at best about 80 cents to $ 1 per album, MCA says.

Such contracts have drawbacks for both sides. Artists can be unceremoniously dropped if they don't live up to expectations. But if they blossom into superstars, they can use their new leverage to demand that their contracts be rewritten to pay them much more.

Hennessy says she let her managers, including her father, worry about the financial details. "Pretty much I was like, 'Is this a good contract, or a bad contract? OK, it's a good contract,' " she recalls. She was not even sure how many albums she owed MCA.

Interesting details.

Ok, let's track that $2.2 million, shall we:

Hennessy and her producer, Dorff, spent about three months recording eight songs, including several he had written. The total tab, including studio time, musicians' salaries, producers' fees and Hennessy's living expenses, was about $ 350,000 - typical for a first pop record, MCA says...

In April 2001, MCA decided to try to get Hennessy notice by releasing her first single, a bouncy tune called I'm Gonna Blow Your Mind. Its opening lines:

"I really really, I really really, I really really, I really really, I really really want to kiss you/

But much more than that/

Boy, I'm gonna blow your mind."

It was a risky choice. MCA realized the song's subject matter - oral sex - made it unlikely to get much exposure on youth-oriented outlets deemed important in launching young artists, such as the Radio Disney network of stations.

Tee hee hee.

But executives felt it was Hennessy's catchiest song. MCA spent $ 250,000 on a video that showed Hennessy dancing in a disco and jumping around with pals in their sleepwear...

The label also earmarked about $ 200,000 to hire independent promoters - middlemen who use their influence with radio program directors to secure airplay.

In addition, MCA spent about $ 100,000 on "imaging" for Hennessy, including photos, clothes and makeup artists. It sent Hennessy on a $ 150,000, four-week promotional tour, where she sang at malls over recorded tapes, backed by two dancers, and at station-sponsored concerts.

Um, so so far we're at $1.05 million. Unfortunately, the Chronicle version skips how the other $1.15 mil was wasted. Essentially what happened was they decided to scrap the first cut of the album and bring in all new writers and producers to write and produce her a new one, and that added another $300,000...and the other $800,000, IIRC, were mostly more payoffs for radio brokers (they tried floating a couple different singles) and the like, although a promotional trip to Europe might have been thrown in there too.

Oh wait: the article was also picked up by the Ottawa Citizen, which has a bit more detail. Re-recording the album actually cost another $600,000, meaning almost a million was spend on recording. And $500,000 more was spent trying to buy radio time for the second single, "Beautiful You".

Grand totals:

$1 mil. for recording, throwing away, and re-recording + living expenses
$700,000 to promoters who try to buy radio time (unsuccessfully in this case; the album really sucks)
$500,000 on various promotional tours.

And what's even more amazing than this tremendous tale of industry stupidity and obvious waste is that MCA actually *shared* all this information with the Journal *voluntarily* because they thought it proved their point about how they need to overcharge for CDs and rip off established musicians in order to pay for their flops. The shocking truth is that while the Carly Hennessy story has a few extra funny details, fully 19 out of 20 big 5 releases are complete flops just like hers.

And a huge huge proportion of that lost money, according to record execs, is the lost money they throw at radio stations to play their new single. Except that, as you point out, the record labels actually *make* money from radio, because of licensing on the songs radio *does* play. And, as there's only 5 record labels, it's not like there's any competition for this royalty money. Indeed you might almost think there's something slightly dishonest about spinning this money as losses when it is automatically going to be made up for by royalty gains on other songs.

Ugh. What a sad, sad story, and a sad, sad industry. And the real tragedy is, the way things are going it looks as if the labels will have just enough time before they put themselves out of business to buy laws that will prevent any sustainable models for distributing and creating music in the Internet age from being possible, even after the labels are gone. The end result may just be less music available, *and* the creation of a copyright police state.

Yet another anecdote

[ansible]

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!

It's different

[teslatug]

Most people prefer the deadtree version, so they might download the e-book and see if they like it, but ultimately I think they buy the paper version to actually read it. This is different from CD's and DVD's since those you can enjoy listening and watching right after you download them. I know a lot of people buy the CD's they have downloaded if they like them, but I am also sure that there are many more who do not.

This works for books because....

[Typingsux]

Reading entire novels on your computer screen will never be as comfortable as curling up on the couch or bed.
People start reading Eric Flints books online, get tired of the computer screen, like the book and purchase it.
Then they comfortably read the book via the aforementioned places.
This won't work successfully for all medium like music as has already been demonstated.

buuut..

[b-side.org]

just like music, this only holds true for works which would normally sell below a certain threshold.

the market rules for an unknown indie rock band are not the same as for metallica - the indie rock band will earn sales by exposure, metallica will lose them through pirating.

same mechanism, different results.

The wife factor

[sunset]

In addition to the improved readability of the printed page, I'm pretty sure it has a special appeal to those of us with wives, or near-equivalents.

Because, you see, for some reason reading a book in the same room with our SO counts as "quality time together"; but reading the same book online counts as "he's obsessed with that damn computer."

Re:The wife factor

[Rupert]

You, sir, are married to my wife, the biandrous bitch.

Not a Napsterite, but I'll respond...

[pagsz]

Point well taken. There certainly is a difference between an artist offering up his/her works and having them forcibly taken.

However, this article points to the stupidity of the publishing industry (and by extension, the MPAA/RIAA)rather than the illegality of services like Napster.

File-sharing could be a boon to these guys if they would just pull their heads out of their asses. Rather than hurting sales, file sharing has been demonstrated to help it (small sample, but it's certainly far more evidence than the MPAA or RIAA can provide). Instead, they push for anti-copying legislation (CBDTPA).

It's just so pathetically ironic: in their attempts to stop piracy, they push more people into seeking illegal alternatives (who wants to pay $30 for a crippled CD when the good tracks are available online for free; no encryption is uncrackable).

And the very thing that they're fighting is the one thing that could save them. As I see it, the internet will leave them in the dust if they don't stop fighting it. Non-mainstream, quality artists will begin bypassing the MPAA/RIAA for internet alternatives. Then things will change.

Aw, hell, who am I kidding? A CBDTPA type-bill will pass, and free will equal illegal.

Extreme optimism and extreme pessimism in the same post? I better get my head checked, I may have schizophrenia,

Stephen King got a lot of money for his ebook

[Cryogenes]

... 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?

I love books

[rossz]

I love books a lot. I have more books than I have shelfspace for. They are crammed into every bit of spare space in three different rooms. My wife and daughter are just as bad. Actually, my wife is worse than me because she will buy the same book in two different languages.

Putting a book online will not prevent me from buying a real paper version of the book. It might get me interested in it enough to buy it.

As for Stephen King's experiment. He went about it the wrong way. Replacing a book with an electronic copy just isn't going to work. I can't lay in bed on a lazy Sunday afternoon and read an ebook. I can't bring it along when I'm going somewhere where I know there will be a wait (e.g. doctor's office) or when I go in that little room with so much privacy.

Sometimes I go through my shelves without anything in mind and run across a book I haven't read in years. It's like bumping into an old friend. You just don't get the same feeling browsing through a directory listing.

Stephen King wasn't too bright

[Catiline]

As a counter-point, I'd bring up 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.

Alright, let's look at the comparison:
Baen: Here, have these books for free. They're lesser known authors but we think that you'll enjoy them. Or if you want new titles, we have a pretty cheap subscription deal.
King: I'm going to try this e-book thing. Since my time is too valuable to just give the work away for free, I'm asking that you (after downloading the book) send me a tiny donation. You know, just a way of saying, "Thanks".

Sure, huge similarities there. One offers hassle-free books (or a $15/month subscription deal for "front list", new books) where what you get is either outright free or the traditional pay upfront, versus "oh if you like this inconvenience yourself to send me a buck". I'm sure that's similar enough that consumer preferences, such as wanting simplicity in the sale process won't distort your figures.

Think about it-- wasn't shareware a flash in the pan marketing method? As long as people could only easily trade files on SneakerNet, shareware piracy didn't get too bad. Nowadays though, the modern Internet makes it easy to distribute warez (what with P2P and easy to setup hhtp/ftp servers). And that's a fact every media format faces. Right now, most of them are arguing for stronger control. On the other hand, I'm quite glad to see Baen (literally) take the wind from the sails of those who argue that "piracy causes lost sales".

Interesting, but inconclusive.

[interstellar_donkey]

Trying to draw parallels between free music and text publishing in relationship to weather they help or hurt sales is an apples to oranges situation.

On the surface, distributing pirated books should be a heck of a lot easier then music. The file size is small (espically in unformated plain text). There is a slightly more difficult situation of getting the printed page to electronic format, but a bored pirate with some OCR software and several hours to kill should be able to do it with little problem.

So, why is'nt anyone trading pirated books? Part of this has to do with a declining love of the medium found in the Internet generation. But I suspect more is found in the computers inability to translate media into an enjoyable format.

When I download a song I like, it's very easy to take the music, pump it to my stereo or burn it onto a CD, making the recording indistingusable from a purchased copy. A text file enjoys no such luxery. Lying on my couch reading off the screen of a laptop is just not as good as holding a book in my hand.

So, when somebody goes online and sees a free book they enjoy, the next logical step is to purchase the thing, because having an actual book format copy is better. There is little value added, other then album art/liner notes, and the knowledge you've done the right thing, by going out and purchasing music.

That having been said, I still think unrestricted free trade of music is a good thing, and helps the artists in the long run. I just don't see this article as being a credible argument for that.

Re:Interesting, but inconclusive.

[nathanh]

So, why is'nt anyone trading pirated books?

They are. Bookwarez is a huge phenomenon with literally 1000s of works of fiction available for grabs. You might not be aware of it, but perhaps you don't read many books. I read a book a week on average and I'm well aware of how easy it is to get illegal copies of books.

So, when somebody goes online and sees a free book they enjoy, the next logical step is to purchase the thing, because having an actual book format copy is better.

I personally prefer e-book format over paper format. I can carry a dozen books around with me on my Palm Pilot. I don't have to remember my page or carry a bookmark. At nighttime I can read by the backlight which is more considerate than using the bedside lamp. I can hold the Palm in one hand: even the thinnest paper book requires two hands.

It's not all peaches and cream. As Eric says in his essay, the quality of the average bookwarez is awful. OCR technology is not good enough and the scans have obviously never been proofread. It's very hard to find sites, and when you do it's uncommon to find what you want. Yet these are all shortcomings with bookwarez, not with e-books. I have no love for the paper book and no desire to read one if I can read an e-book instead.

I still feel obligated to buy all my books in paper format, if only because I know that the authors won't get paid otherwise. It's also comforting to have a physical library instead of bits on a disc. But after buying my books I put them on my bookshelf and spend an agonising hour or two trying to find a badly OCRd "pirate" copy on the web so I can read it in a comfortable format. I really hate doing that: it wastes my time and detracts from the enjoyment of the book. I wish the publishers would wisen up and include with the paper book a CD containing an e-book version (preferably ASCII text).

That having been said, I still think unrestricted free trade of music is a good thing, and helps the artists in the long run. I just don't see this article as being a credible argument for that.

I think the article does have a credible argument, because I can strongly relate to it. I've bought more books now than ever before. This is partly is due to me having a greater disposable income than I used to, but I don't think that's the whole answer. I believe that bookwarez have increased my spending on books by introducing me to new authors. I'm an honest person and if I like a bookwarez I'll pay for a legal copy. Money isn't the issue. It's all about convenience. The book publishers are going out of their way to make my life inconvenient, and I'm the one who wants to buy their product!

Regular, paper libraries, anyone?

[Dreamweaver]

Everyone's going on about how this can't be compared because:
1) Books are in diminished form on a computer display
2) Weber's not terribly popular
3) This study is a small sample

So how about brick-and-mortar libraries? They've been around for centuries and don't seem to be harming sales. True, you don't get to Keep the book, but you can read pretty much any book you want whenever you want (with some slight delay) by any author (popular or not) via inter-library loans. And, really, how often do you re-read a fiction novel? Once every few years, if ever again?
I think I've spent more money over the years on books by authors whom I'd sampled at a library than I have on unknowns. I've even been known to go buy a book I read from a library if I liked it well enough.

Maybe that doesn't translate directly to music, since you generally want to keep a song once you've got it rather than having a 2 week loan, but the only difference between this and a public library is that you trade the convenience of a dead-tree book for the convenience of staying home rather than going all the way to the library building. Libraries have yet to kill book sales, and I don't think I've ever heard an author complain about libraries having their book, so this whole thing is a foregone conclusion.

Hard figures

[PCM2]

From the article:

I think my hard figures demonstrate how absurd that claim is. It does not follow that simply because a copy is available for free that sales will therefore be hurt. In fact, they are more likely to be helped, for the simple reason that free copies-call them "samplers," if you will-are often the necessary inducement to convince people to buy something.

I'm pretty skeptical that the figures he's citing -- "hard" though they may be -- actually prove anything about whether giving away books for free results in better sales.

On the one hand, his most convincing point is that "certainly giving books away hasn't hurt my sales any, even if it hasn't helped them." But he can't actually say that, can he? Maybe the increase in sales he noticed late in term is a result of exactly what he suggests elsewhere in his essay -- the fact that he's gained more publicity as a writer since the book first came out. In that case, isn't it entirely possible that his sales would have gone up even more if he hadn't given away free copies to a portion of his potential readers?

"But wait," you argue, "the reason he gained publicity is because he was giving the books away." But again, that's not going to be true for everyone, is it? Once every single author in existence is giving away books for free, we'll be at exactly the point we're at now, where the only people who get publicity are the ones who pay for it -- in terms of advertising, book tours, public speaking gigs, what-have-you.

This guy likes giving away books? Fine. He says it hasn't hurt him any. Fine. But his evidence isn't all that empirical. All he can really say is that even though he's giving books away, he's been satisfied with the sales he's gotten.

What's more, he could say the same if he was sending out promo copies of the dead tree version. This doesn't really say much at all about the glorious future of Internet-delivered media, from where I sit. It's just a cute experiment that one guy did. I'd like to see it reproduced by someone else -- maybe a few someones -- before really take any of it seriously.

My experiences with the Free Library

[Minupla]

I ran across the Free Library from a link in a /. comment, and read one of David Webers' books for the first time. I thereby discovered the Honor Harrington series of books of which I got to read the first title for free. I immediately put my friend onto the series who bought the first and subsequent volumes in dead-tree form. I myself discovered webscriptions.net where Baen sells electronic versions of their current and some back title list. I picked up the rest of the Honor series and have taken to reading most of my Baen series through webscriptions (heck, 10$ for 4-5 books, if I only ever read the one I bought that book bundle for, I break even, which has never been the case. If I read all 4-5 books (which is usually the case) I get them for 2-3$/book! A heck of a deal. Also ebooks work for me, I can load them on my palm when I'm working and don't have to carry a paperback with me to a client site, something that distracts from the professional air of a consultant working in 'managment' jobs).

So Baen has definately made money off the 2-3 books they gave me for free.

Incidentally, the author gets more money per book off of books I buy in e-format then they would if I went to the bookstore and bought a copy, and I can download them again if I lose my ecopy, and I save trees.

to the RIAA and MPAA

[Avery_Zero]

I read this article a couple days ago (even submitted it to /. ), and I think the main message to grep out of this is for the MPAA and RIAA to back up their arguments with proof. Eric provides hard data in the form of sales figures that show, pretty conclusively, that the existence of free copies of his books actually increased sales (een those that were made freely available). While I will grant that the book publishing industry and the music/movie publishing industry are different animals, I would call upon the RIAA/MPAA to give us some data to back up their arguments. Take a chance, do some research, make pretty graphs, whatever! Just stop treating us (your customers) like theives, ok?

Avery

textbooks; my experience as an author

[bcrowell]

I was interested in this:

... Charles Vest, president of MIT, as an aside mentioned that when college textbook presses (like the one at MIT) put up free e-text copies of their new textbooks at the same time they published the print version, sales of the print versions went UP.

If it works to increase the sale for things as over priced as the normal college textbook...

Does anyone know what the actual textbook(s) is he's referring to? AFAIK, my site The Assayer is the biggest catalog on the web of books that have been intentionally made free-as-in-something by their authors, and I don't have any of the examples he's referring to. I'd be grateful if anyone could reply here about what they are, so I can add them in.

What he's saying matches up perfectly with my own experience with self-publishing free books. My own books are free-as-in-copyleft, and are also for sale in dead tree format. I've done very little traditional promotion, and yet my books have been fairly successful, considering that it's not easy for a self-published author to break into the textbook market. As the author of the article points out, it's pretty hard to know for sure whether certain sales results are the result of any particular action, such as making books available for free in digital form. But one good indication is that the small amount of non-web promotion that I did (sending out free evaluation copies on CD) was nearly all in California, whereas none of the teachers who have adopted my books are in California.

Other examples

[3seas]

Though I never got into the Napster thing others I worked with did and they put together some CD's that I really liked as they contained alot of old songs that I liked.

Listening to these CDs at work, where they would play them, brought to mind these old songs and even the idea of going out and buying the artist CDs.
But then all the crap started up and I said the hell with it, never buying any of the CDs that the napster stuff brought to mind.

Now it's a matter of out sight (ear) out of mind. To bad for the music business... uh errr...greed business...

Wener Bros. is cracking down on Matrix fan sites now....

All this reminds me of the story of the dog who lost the steak in his mouth when he saw his reflection and his greed tried to get the steak from his own reflection and lost what he had...

I'm not at all supprised about the findings of this author, cept for finding some "creator" realizing all this.

Reminds me of my brother

[freeweed]

In his last apartment, the computer was in the living room. When the wife was on the couch reading a book, if he sat and watched TV, it was 'quality time'. If he sat and read, it was 'quality time'. If he sat and picked his nose... well you get the idea.

The minute he went on the computer (generally doing things like reading and coding, things most people would consider at least a bit more useful and rewarding than the idiot box), she freaked.

I find this sort of antipathy towards computers is all too prevalent in our society. Then again, it's what keeps us in high demand, I suppose... :)

It's STILL the paper...

[Ian Peon]

A good friend of mine had pointed out that the music industry doesn't really understand why they make money. Radio, borrowed tapes, MP3s... there are many ways to get the music, but it's not quite the same as owning the CD.

When the music industry realizes that people are buying media, not music, we'll all be better off. To make it more attractive, we would probably see better quality album inserts and other items that make buying the CD worth the money.

Therefore, I argue that (music at least) DOES have this sort of media 'problem' - CD liners and other gimmiks included with the album can be *way* better than an ID3 tag or a web site.

Re:It's STILL the paper...

[hacker]

When the music industry realizes that people are buying media, not music, we'll all be better off. To make it more attractive, we would probably see better quality album inserts and other items that make buying the CD worth the money.

Except that the RIAA and MPAA would then charge much more for that same disk, thus starting the whole cycle over again. CDs cost too much already. The recording industry makes billions a year, while artists are being sued because they need to claim bankruptcy just to eat and pay the rent.

Just because you see them on MTV or hear them on the radio doesn't mean they're not slaves to their record contract, and the threat of being sued for trying to get out of the contract weighs over their heads.

The whole record industry, movie industry, copyright/trademark/intellectual property law industry is dirty, and needs a really healthy washing.

My fear is that soon the SSSCA/CBDTPA or a similar law will be passed, and free will be illegal. "If you didn't pay for it, you must be breaking the law, because we have to make money on everything you do!"