Book marketing - does giving them away for free sell books?
Not just since Google rolled out their Book Search program the debate about giving access to book content for free online has heated up. Opponents are convinced this will cannibalize book sales while proponents see it as a marketing factor: having the entire books indexed and at least in parts available online would make the previously invisible visible, making them part of the online conversation in the first place, just like most of the news sites had to acknowledge by shifting from paid walled-garden subscriptions to free and open access. Chris Anderson, godfather of the Long Tail, even coined Freeconomics as his latest paradigm shifting topic.
Since some groundbreaking shifts in thinking about content and business models are involved it is hardly surprising that the debate has been a very ideological one from the get-go. My take on it was the following: as long as there is no mass-adoption of substitutes to the traditional paper-based book (such as e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle) and only parts of the content are available, people will still opt to buying the book instead of reading it on screen or going through the hassle of printing it out themselves. For textbooks, however, I expected to see quite the contrary: given the price, the budget of students, and the fact that often only several pages are relevant from an entire textbook which can be searched for and referenced for papers in a very targeted fashion, I expected to see substantial cannibalization.
But let’s leave the world of speculation and ideology and look at some numbers. Cory Doctorow has always been convinced his books were not selling in spite of being released for free under Creative Commons but rather because of it:
“[...] it’s no foregone conclusion that free electronic copies of a book will substitute for sales of physical copies of that book. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was released as a free, open download on the same day that it appeared in stores. Three years later, it’s in its sixth printing and more than 650,000 copies of it have been distributed from my website (an untold and unknowable number of copies have been distributed by others, as well). That’s because my biggest threat as an author isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. The majority of ideal readers who fail to buy my book will do so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free electronic copy.” Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google
Paulo Coelho made quite a splash at the DLD conference in Munich this year when he acknowledged that he turned to pirating his own books, setting up a blog (Pirate Coelho) with links to free copies on filesharing networks. His take on it: online “piracy” has helped him not only to be more widely read, but also to sell more books:
Publishers sueing Google back in 2005 over Google’s Book Search have seen very positive results with a significant increase in sales from this program by 2006, as well as from Amazon’s Search Inside program. It seems that some of these results have encouraged some publishers to try marketing new releases by giving away the electronic version for free - with a significantly positive impact on offline sales.
I suspect that this impact can only be sustained in an era of transition from the traditional paper-based book to an electronic equivalent with mass market adoption. The music industry saw its sales of CDs plunge as it doesn’t really make a difference to the way I consume music whether I purchase a physical CD or download my tracks from somewhere. With books this haptic difference is still intact - for now.
Cory Doctorow’s take: “Smart authors, then, should make some hay while the sun shines — that is, use free ebooks to sell print books. That will make authors rich today. To ensure that authors stay rich tomorrow, though, we need prepare to change over to the new models that emerge when books are most often freely copyable digital objects. The best way to do that is to perform millions of experiments with digital texts to see which approaches are likely to bear fruit.”
Given these results the verdict is quite clear: giving away free electronic versions of your book does lift sales of the paper-based book rather then cannibalizing it, as it becomes part of the conversation and people don’t see it as a substitute for the “real thing”. Where do you think the book is heading in the future? How will authors and publishers engage their readers differently? Will they go down the same route the music industry went and have to start making a living from other things than the sale of just the “product” book?
Additional Links:
[German] “Kopieren ist gut für Autoren” - Interview Cory Doctorow
[German] Netz-Avantgardist Doctorow: Professor Unrast
Tags: books, Creative Commons, Intellectual Property, Marketing
Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 0:42 and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 14th, 2008 at 20:10
[...] Book marketing - does giving them away for free sell books? [...]
September 26th, 2008 at 14:11
[...] Book marketing - does giving them away for free sell books? [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 13:04
Here is more evidence (50+ links collected in the last years):
http://delicious.com/Klausgraf/monograph_open_access