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Buy One Book, Get Twenty-Two Free
nojayuk writes "Jim Baen of Baen Books is releasing David Weber's latest space opera epic in the Honor Harrington series, War of Honor, with a CD-ROM bound in the back a la computer reference works. From the website, he says this CD-ROM will contain the complete text of 22 novels, including all the previous Harrington books by Weber as well as illustrations of book jackets, sound samples etc. The Baen website says the texts on the CD-ROM will be unencrypted, requiring no special readers or decoders. The files are in .rtf or .html format, and the buyer will be able to download them into their PDA of choice. Baen's website is already a rich source of free SF books for download; I've harvested quite a few myself in the past. Jim and many of his writers are advocates of this kind of promotion, dismissing talk about piracy as paranoia. Baen books also supports a Web subscription service for new books, another bonus for PDA bookreaders." We've mentioned the Baen library and its effects on sales in several previous stories; it'll be interesting to see how this CD-ROM helps or hurts.
I think this is a good precedent.
Firstly, I love value. If I percieve value, I'm more inclined to want. I think this is true among most any shopper though.
I think *all* content is moving toward the direction of free, or very inexpensive.
Think about distribution costs.
Cost of DVD presing materials + cost of pressing DVDs + warehousing + shipping = a lot of costs to recoup in product cosot
Compare with internet or electronic distribution.
Cost of maintaining 1 copy available to purchasers + cost of delivery (cost of internet connectivity)
Its WAAAAY cheaper!
Its good to see this revolution happening.
Normally I would agree with you but when you hit your local bookstore and see the crap that the 'bestseller' list is rife with. Jackie Collins, Romance Novels, abd other shite, it makes you wonder if there is any correlation to talent or if the General reading public is truly a good representation to judge what is quality literature.
An Oprah Winfrey endorsement or even the book of the month club deal can drives sales up on what would normally be something that should be consigned to the bargain table at the end of the summer, or suitabale for wrapping fish. And we all know that Oprah is one of the literati. What kind of lemmings mentality have we come to where Oprah Winfrey can have a staff member read a book, tell the the Big O, Oprah, and the endorsement sells millions?
My point is that digital publish is great. I love it. Opens the medium to get more people reading. Although, as a newtwork engineer d00d I prefer to have the book in my hand than read it on a PDA. Call me retro. Can't imagine a long snooze in the tub with the good old PDA in hand.... I can always dry the book out.
And then taste is in the mouth, eyes, mind of the beholder. I for one look at the best seller lists and shudder. And to be fair, I will buy one at least once a month and read it, and sometimes I will be pleasantly surprised. Other times I choose to cringe in horror in the closet for a few days.
As for sci-fi. Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling seem to carry on the tradition well. Hard stuff with a sense of humor that is quite beleivable in a not so distant future. Allen Steel with this Moon backs a few years back were great as well. But I find more self on an ever increasing hunt for really good sc fi. How many Enders Game sequels can we have? Gibson needs to get off his ass and back to the Sprawl.
My point to this entire rant is that we need some quality to put on the medium for the would be publishers just start putting everything on to the insnanely popular shiny metal discs we all must have in our caves,homes. A bad book is a bad book no matter what the format.
I can't wait to get my DVD of the Ya Ya Sisterhood special edition with cutscenes, the book, the script, so I can put it on my Palm and have all the Ya Ya goodness whereever I go.
Put all the classics on the medium first. There is nothing worse than being on a plane or a trip with nothing to read, than having something bad to read.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Well, regardless of how much I hate DMCA and similar crap, the point is that the book costs a few dollars and it is much nicer to read from a paper form, while a copy an important piece of software costs hundereds and is equally useful, regardless of whether you have the original or a copy.
My point is that book writers can only boost their sales by giving free electronic copies away, while software companies not neccessarily so.
Consider that before people were sneaking into movies, they were sneaking into sporting events and plays. I'll be they had gate crashers even in ancient Rome.
The higher-ups need to take a look at the expense and hassle of an encryption technology, and what losses they reasonably expect if your product were presented in plain ASCII text. Reasonable losses is a concept lost on many MBAs. You base your estimates upon past losses, not upon imagined future losses. For example, one of the software publishing groups takes the number of PCs sold, the number of software titles sold, and since the number of PCs is greater, assumes that their software was installed on all those PCs (and were thus pirated). It never enters their minds that not every PC gets commercial software installed on it, or that PCs break, or that not every software title gets installed on every new PC.
Fifty years ago, how did publishers deal with pirated works? Why won't those same techniques work now? (Don't give me that line about the new economy. People still buy things, and it's still illegal to pirate copyrighted works.) Why put yourself in the position of being the police force, including the added expense and hassle. If you're still making money, then you're OK. Turn the evidence over to the Feds, and let them handle it (and the expense).
An easy way to prevent piracy? Make it cheap to be a member who can access eBooks, and provide the eBooks in a variety of formats (including ASCII). Provide a two year free membership for people who turn in other people that are distributing pirated works. Use tiered pricing, where the average person (who is a light reader), can get a title per month for their $20/year fee. For heavier readers, step the price up gently. For libraries and schools, offer a flat, unlimited download fee (like $500/year) but restrict them to one account and password assigned to someone on staff. Talk to the big porn web sites, and find out how they track and identify logins that are fake, or have been shared amongst several users. I'll bet there's a company out there right now that makes software that does access log profiling -- and it wouldn't be that different than the pattern monitoring that many credit card companies offer for tracking purchases.
I think you can make money at $20/year. There's no printing costs, no distributing, no spoilage, no transportation, and no wasted copies. You can still charge vanity press or estimated low sales authors a fee for "sharing in the risk of publication."
The simple truth is that you can't make your product popular and easy to use if there are any requirements for its use. The simple fact that it must be decoded so that it can be read means that every watermarking, steganographic, or encryption method will fail (and the DVD/HDTV folks are spending a lot of money trying to ignore this). Until you can inject your works directly into the brain of the consumer, I doubt that you can avoid piracy. (And even then, some pirate will likely figure out how to use the consumer's brain as the master copy for duplication.)
Be a farmer. Accept that some of the crop is lost every year, and that you've got to make money on the good part of the crop.
Heck, try my model for a year. If you don't make money, you will at least have a bug-free distribution system.
As a 'book passer/swapper/loaner/etc.', frequent library patron and advocate of learning by reading; I'm very impressed. How many of us have paid for every single book we've read? I don't know about you all, but I hardly buy books from my computer book club, amazon.com or the local store unless I can get them at a discount. The authors get a cut for each book that doesn't change if the retail provider or publisher offers it at 5-15% off. I love books but my pockets aren't deep enough for a $300 per month reading habit.
For those of you that like to learn and oftentimes find it hard to spend sixty, ninety, or two hundred plus dollars for your technical books, try your local Ollie's/Odd Lots or other clearinghouses like that. The books are sometimes six months old; but you still get them and they give you good foundations. You can buy 10 for what you may have spent on two in the bookstore. Check out sites like http://www.informit.com that provide a lot of Que and similar series books for free online. There is a wealth of material there.
Back to the main topic: those of you that whine about reading electronically sure spend a lot of time in front of a computer playing, writing code, etc.! If it's that hard, start applying yourself to creating readable displays for ebooks and the like...! I read a lot of web material and Adobe E-book reader, as well as Palm format documents in addition to my collection of printed material.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
I was involved in the Schmitz project, and have been watching events at Baen. Eric Flint indicates that the underlying idea is similar to that followed by some drug kingpins--free samples to hook the user. It seems to be working.
Ever read anything by Ian Flemming? Absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever. Makes Tom Clancy look almost readable by comparison.
For me, having the CD-ROM would be like those "check out the first chapter of 's new book!" sections at the back of a lot of novels. You get just a taste, and that encourages you to buy the whole novel. I realize he has the whole novel on there, but I wouldn't be able to stand reading a book on a computer screen. I'd break down and buy the mass market paperback after the first chapter or so. I can't curl up in bed on a lazy Saturday morning with a monitor!
--
Disclaimer: The above statement probably includes half-truths, because real truth is too complicated.
I work at a small, independant, science fiction and fantasy bookstore. In fact, I'm there right now (although I'll admit I'm not really 'working' at the moment...). And so I know better than many exactly what the state of science fiction in America is. And, unfortunatly, it isn't great.
The bookstore I work at, The Stars Our Destination (url: www.sfbooks.com), has been around since the early 1990s and has seen sci-fi falter and, unfortunatly, decline somewhat. It's not that things aren't being written. It's that people aren't getting published. Far to many publishers have been gobbled up into huge corperations and are now in the market to make money, not books.
So instead of publishing a whole lot, like they used to, they're now (for the most part) publishing only books they think will make money. And this usually means books that are very (often painfully) similar.
I admit, this isn't *always* the case. There are dozens of very small presses who still try and get good stuff out that may not look as profitable as some of the cookie-cutter novels being published. But, all too often, it's the same old shit being published.
I think this (including a CD with the latesr _Honor_ book) is a great idea. If for no other reason, it's unique. As I said, a lot of crap is lining the shelves. An eye-catcher could mean the difference between a sale and picking up a different book.
In their latest reprinting, some of the _Sandman_ graphic novels come with a free CD. Rather than extra _Sandman_ content (which would be *really* cool) the CDs contain 400+ pages of other DC best-sellers. Not complete comics, but really nifty teasers. The free CD with the _Honor_ book isn't exactly the same thing, but it's another way to get closer to the consumer; to be able to get the buyer to see material they otherwise wouldn't.
So. I don't think this CD will make or break the book. But I think it will only help sales. And this is speaking both as a consumer of sci-fi, and a seller.
-Trillian
PS: Please visit our website, www.sfbooks.com! We do mail order anywhere on Earth! The little bookstores need your business!
They make a very big point about how everything is in rtf format. Pretty amazing. Sounds like they're trying to get the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, piracy thing going
WTF?!?
They don't want you to pirate their stuff. They want to be paid. What planet are you on right now?
They are being nice. They could have picked one format that is loaded down with tons of Digital Rights Management junk. Instead they skipped the DRM junk and released their books in unencrypted files. Just to make sure it is convenient for you, they release each book in five different formats: HTML, RTF, Palm Doc, Rocket eBook, and MS Reader.
The books that they put in the "Free Library" are free as in beer. You can make copies and hand them out to your friends. By the way, the first two books in the Honor Harrington series are in the Free Library. That's how I got hooked on HH.
Please don't pirate Baen ebooks. It's biting the hand that is being nice to you.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You completely ignored the reason I gave for the piracy: It is good advertising which results in more sales.
You got hooked on HH because of free books. You bought more because of free books. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, piracy accomplishes the same thing, especially when a better version is available at some cost. People who acquire the inferior version for free will often spend money for the better version. If those people would never have bought the book in the first place without the piracy, you have made a sale because of piracy.
These books are being made available on CD because Weber knows that he is no longer making a great deal of money from older books. He feels that any resultant priacy will actually result in a net gain for him.