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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."
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?
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.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
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.
Free Mac Mini
..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.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
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.
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??!?)
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
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!
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."
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,
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
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 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.
-- Will program for bandwidth
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.
The Internet is generally stupid
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.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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