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By Chris Meadows

Previously we mentioned that  Simon Owens at Bloggasm reported that two BYU academics have looked at the sales of 41 print books for 8 weeks before and 8 weeks after after they were released as free e-books. (You can read their results here.) They found that there is a “moderate correlation” between the release of free e-books and a growth in the sale of the print version in most cases.

Interestingly, one of the cases where there was not a correlation—and sales actually went down—was in the case of the free e-books Tor.com offered temporarily to promote the new blog, and only to people signed up for their newsletter.

Why were the results from Tor so different from the others? This question cannot be answered with certainty. The only thing we know is that Tor’s model of making the books available for one week only and requiring registration in order to download the book was substantially different from the models used to create free versions of the other books we studied.

Owens spoke to John Hilton, one of the study’s authors, about the study. Hilton pointed out that even if sales of those specific titles did not benefit, they may have had other benefits that were not measured by the study—signing more people up for the newsletter and bringing them to Tor.com, for example.

But of course, things could change with the release of the iPad and other next-generation e-book readers that follow. Owens notes:

Those who have advocated free ebooks sometimes argue that people inherently don’t like reading longer works on a screen, so they would sometimes buy a print title after sampling it online. But this new generation of e-readers are designed to be read just like dead-tree books, adding a new dynamic to the mix. If ebooks themselves become a valuable commodity, why give them away for free?

Though there are other beneficial factors apart from just sales, of course. Building up name-recognition, for example. Cory Doctorow’s free e-books basically took Doctorow from being just a well-known blogger to being a well-known SF author too.

Hilton would like to perform the study again, with more titles over a longer period of time, and access to more information such as how many people downloaded a given book. However, publishers are leery of both giving books away for free and giving out those kinds of figures. (Perhaps they should talk to Baen.)

I think it’s great to have this kind of systematic study out there. While it is still fairly small, it at least gets away from the realm of “anecdotal” evidence by comparing books in a number of genres and from a number of sources.

If this were a few years ago, I would probably be worried that this would reinforce the false impression that e-books only have value as promotional gimmicks, not in and of themselves—a charge that has sometimes been leveled against Baen for its promotional use of them, and against Tor for its temporary, limited giveaway of them.

But since the Kindle has proven beyond a doubt that there are plenty of consumers out there willing to buy e-books, too, that might not be such a worry anymore.

All the same, I hope publishers will pay attention to this study and start testing the waters with more free e-book releases of their own. Wouldn’t it be something if, rather than fearing e-books might cannibalize print sales, they started using them to boost them instead?

Though, again, nobody knows what the next few years will bring. It’s just vaguely possible that we might finally start to reach the tipping point where e-books start to become a good enough substitute that having the e-book means you might not need to buy the paper book. What will become of free e-books then?

 
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