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Cory Doctorow’s e-free/p-paid biz model working in Wiley tests
December 8, 2006 | 10:40 am
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By David Rothman
So can you make money off p-books by giving away electronic copies for free? You may in the short term, even though the long term might be more problematic. It’s a book-by-book decision. Since most books fade away after a few years, many authors and publishers may want to use Cory Doctorow‘s e-free/p-paid approach to boost sales early on and not fret over the future. Others may look ahead to the era of better e-book hardware and other improvements—such as a standardized format?—and go for e-paid from the start and forever more.
At Wiley, however, at least for now, a publishing executive named Joe Wikert has enjoyed good luck with e-free/p-paid. In the wake of Cory’s e-free/p-paid advocacy in Forbes, Wikert says:
We’ve experimented a bit with this in our own group at Wiley. For example, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel‘s Naked Conversations was written and commented about on a public blog. The book has done and continues to do quite well. Would we have sold more copies if something less than 100% of the content was available on the blog? I seriously doubt it. The blog was the primary publicity vehicle for the project and served us well. The reality is that we’re all learning as we go on this front, but I definitely see the value of free content online; I’m not saying I’d do it for every project, but I see where it makes sense in many situations.
Responding to another Forbes article, by Ben Vershbow of if:book, Wikert also had some nice words for the linky philosophy of networked books: “Considering all the content available on any given topic today, an e-content editor should serve as more of a travel guide, flagging all the best reading stops along the way. That’s also what many bloggers do today. For example, I read a lot of articles, blogs, etc., related to publishing and generally try to refer to only the best when I point to them from my blog; I greatly appreciate it when other bloggers do the same since it saves me a lot of time.”
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Comments:
The chapters we posted online for free most certainly boosted sales more than anything else. However, those chapters were rewritten, sometimes extensively, and always with blog reader imput. The blog chapters are often quite different than what appeared in the book.
The “free” issue aside for a moment, there is one other interesting aspect. The people who purchased e versions of Naked Conversations in the form of a PDF file from Amazon, overwhelmingly hated the product. .PDF was of course designed to be printed out, so that form of e-book begins as less than perfect. Likewise, our blog statistics showed that when we published entire chapters, sometimes over 10,000 words long, readership fell of dramatically. I just published a lengthy interview about Palestinian and Israeli kids joining in a private online community and readership fell off once again.
The fact remains that most people prefer to read books in their traditional form and they remain willing to pay for them.
Actually, we gave away extremely few free finished copies of Naked Conversations. In retrospect, it may have been wise to give away more of them as Cory suggests in his article.
Great insights, Shel! I like the idea of giving away the whole book (if you’re going this route) to reward people for offering the feedback.
Best of luck to you and Robert on the sales front!
The fact remains that most people prefer to read books in their traditional form and they remain willing to pay for them.
Certainly true for now. It’ll be interesting to see what the future brings.
David