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Does a free e-book help or hurt the sales of a paper book?
February 17, 2007 | 7:00 am
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By Garson O'Toole
I wondered if anyone credible had cited an example where a free e-book might have damaged the sales of a paper book. And I found just such a person to quote in the interest of heterodoxy at TeleRead. But first some history.
Again and again you’ve read a free e-book can help the sales of a paper book by acting as a marketing tool. Novelist and activist Cory Doctorow is a well-known proponent of this view. Diane Duane recently espoused this view in a podcast mentioned at TeleRead. Consultant Suw Charman said in her blog: “Thus it is beneficial to release a free e-book so that you can reach as wide an audience as possible, as you stand a good chance of converting e-book downloads to paper book sales.” Later in a comment here at TeleRead she said that the “base assumption that many people make that giving away e-books will damage sales of a p-book is not as well founded in fact as they would like to think.”
This is impressive testimony, but in the interest of diversity at TeleRead, I offer the following quote from 2005 by well-known publisher Tim O’Reilly:
It’s hard to get definitive answers to the amount that free content online affects the sales of print books. There are just too many variables in the experiment. Sometimes, free content on the web helps put an author or a book on the map — The Cathedral and the Bazaar (55,000 copies sold since 1999) or Hackers and Painters (16,000 since last May) are two good examples.
In other cases, with books like The Linux Network Administrator’s Guide (66,000 copies since 1994), we had nice sales, but by comparison with other books like Running Linux (500,000+ copies sold) or Linux in a Nutshell (several hundred thousand), or even a more specialized title like Linux Device Drivers (88,000 since 1998) or Understanding the Linux Kernel (79,000 since 2000), we infer that this very strong and highly rated book sold fewer copies because of the availability of freely available copies.
Photo credit: Creative Commons-licensed photo by natesmama. Chosen by moderator.
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Comments:
Please, for once, let’s not believe everything Cory Doctorow says!
Offering ebooks/web versions for free does reduce the incentive to buy a print copy. The reason Cory found a publisher who went along with the idea was NOT because the idea would work in all cases at all times for all authors.
The publisher went along with the idea because:
From the writer’s standpoint, the “thrill and glory” of getting something published as a print book (and the modest royalty advance) is hardly worth the penalty of not being able to keep the content online for readers.
If I were Author X and had no reputation and no web presence and I insisted that my novel (or manifesto) be simultaneously published in print and web form, I doubt publishers would jump at the chance to sign me up. The thing is the web is great at attracting content. People can’t help it; they write; they publish; it’s instant gratification. For writers like Cory, they already had their works on the web. It made no sense to agree to a publishing deal if it stripped them of the exposure they had previously. The financial inducements would have to be pretty high.
So IF you have an A-list blog where you can publicize your book and IF ebook devices are still cumbersome and expensive, it MIGHT make sense for publishers to allow simultaneous publication for free on the web. In most cases, it does not make sense. That is why (for fiction writers) getting that web traffic is a BFD.
However, some kinds of content will have a enduring appeal in the print world even after ebooks take off. I’m speaking of novelty books (popup books, multimedia print books), oversized coffee table books and technical manuals (there are advantages to having a print book beside your PC or in your backpack while on the bus). Also cookbooks (bringing your laptop to the supermarket is –shall we–say a pain). As ebook readers become more affordable or have more display real estate, I predict that fewer publishers will agree to allow web versions of this content. (That is, unless the author insists upon it!).
One option that might occur is publishers might let you preview the entire contents of a ebook’s content on a special proprietary PC browser (like what Amazon has). You can view the contents; you just will have to buy the ebook to be able to have it in a portable form.
The biggest advocate of this philosophy I know of is Eric Flint whose books are published by Baen Books. Going to Baen’s website will lead you to the relevant articles.
The case of Baen is not precisely like Doctorow’s however: in most cases Baen has offered free versions of older books, the first books in a series. The last books are not offered for free. In spite of this, Mr Flint offers in his columns hard numbers supporting his claim that the free ebooks helped sales of all his books including the volumes with free e-editions.
Personally I think it makes sense that readers today will “try out” ebooks they can get for free, and, if they like them, they will buy print editions to finish reading.
Once better ebook devices become available and widely used, though — that is likely to change.
I’ve only read one free Baen ebook. I read it all on my old Psion, and liked it enough to finish it, but not enough to investigate other titles by the author. (I am curious to see if this author later improved — so I might still check out other titles, I just haven’t done so yet.) So in my case the free ebook “bait” brought neither Baen nor that author any hard-cash sales.
Just one anecdote.
Nice post, Garson. The stuff that I have been writing lately about ebooks, audiobooks and ‘open publishing’ is part of a series of research posts, each pretty raw and examining a single aspect or idea. I am going to address the opposing side, so this certainly feeds well into that.
Much as I support open publishing, I do question whether it would work for everyone, or every genre. The examples that we have tend to be in the computing/scifi/fantasy genres, (if computing is a genre!), where readers are already likely to be online and aware of this model of publishing.
One could draw parallels with so-called ‘blooks’, where people have taken the content of a blog and turned it into a book, such as Tom Reynold’s Blood, Sweat and Tea (also released online for free), but again you have the online component.
The problem is, as Cory says, that we don’t have a way of doing direct comparisons. If I release a book online for free, we don’t have access to a parallel universe where I didn’t release that book online for free, so we have no way to make a direct comparison. Question is, how do we try to understand the influences at work in these experiments? Can we really say that The Linux Network Administrator’s Guide sold less because it was release online? Or was there something about the book that put people off buying it? Can we really say that Cory’s books sold more? Or was it Cory’s existing reputation/fanbase?
The post you quoted was just one aspect of a complex story… I need to write more on the issue to balance things out. The problem I see is that naysayers talk about the cannibalisation of sales as if that effect has been studied and proven, but it hasn’t. It’s far more complicated than ‘one download = one lost sales’.
Thanks to Robert Nagle, Pond and Suw Charman for wonderfully informative comments. I certainly agree with Suw Charman’s phrase that “It’s far more complicated than ‘one download = one lost sales’.” E-books and p-books are usually not substitutable from the viewpoint of consumer utility.
To provide additional perspective there is another example of high-profile free texts (and audio) in the SF field. After the nominations for the Hugo awards are announced many of the works in the competition are released for free in e-text form on the net. Here is a Usenet message from 2001 about Hugo nominees available online. Here is a web page with links to works for the 2006 Hugos.
The works are typically not placed in the public domain nor are they placed under a “Creative Commons” license (though some nominated works, e.g., Doctorow’s were already available under “Creative Commons” license). The free availability is often temporary and the works are withdrawn from official distribution sources after the Hugo competition is over. Yet some stories remain available longer. The winner of the 2006 Hugo for short story was “Tk’tk’tk” by David D. Levine. It is available free now in text form and even as an audio podcast at the “Escape Pod” website.
[...] There’s plenty of talk about whether giving away books can translate into paperbook sales. Cory Doctorow is a believer. I made the case here a few weeks back on Ebook Sunday. Michele Albert is putting her money where her mouth is. Albert is a multi-published author under the names Jerrot and Albert. Absolute Trouble is a book that was edited and published by Avon in 1988. Publisher’s Weekly said the following of Albert’s debut effort Jerrott’s theme of redemption brings heart to this finely crafted plot, but what this novice writer does best is create memorable characters and, in an unusual coup, she manages to reveal her protagonists’ layers during sizzling sex scenes. [...]
Cory Doctorow thinks that readers who like an e-edition of his books will buy the p-edition because people who are readers will be readers forever, and they are positively pervy for paper. But when DearAuthor interviewed Claire Israel (Director of Digital Content and Business Development of Simon & Schuster), she predicted that in the future readers will not need a physical object on a shelf to feel ownership. If Israel is correct, then readers will be satisfied with the free ebook and will not need to purchase a paper copy.
I tend to agree with Claire Isreal. It will be interesting to see.