Although this is not directly about e-books, it uses the economics of digital media in a way similar to some e-book charity efforts, and reiterates an important point about digital piracy. Back in May, I reported on the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a pack of five games that a group of indie developers was offering for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a name-your-own-price download.
The group of developers has come out with a second bundle, the “Humble Indie Bundle #2”, and once more the proceeds are being split among the developers and charities EFF and Child’s Play. (This time, a small “tip” is included to the administrative staff who put the game together.) It can be purchased for oneself, or sent as a gift. (I did both.)
The pack includes the award-winning Braid, as well as four lesser-known titles. All games are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and all are DRM-free and can be downloaded without time limit. (The first bundle also lately became available for download via Steam to those who had bought it. Presumably the second will also.)
Jeffery Rosen, co-founder of Wolfire Games, talked with Ars Technica about lessons learned from the first bundle. He noted that the bundle had demonstrated that piracy was inevitable, even when the alternative was paying as little as one penny for the right to download DRM-free games, and also that open-sourced games were still commercially viable.
This is a lesson we’ve heard from other people in the industry: focus on the positive, and work on giving players the best experience possible. "The moral of the story for me is that there are many, many people who are good and honest," Rosen explained. "If you focus on making them happy, they will reward you. Don’t worry about making life difficult for people who aren’t going to support you anyways."
Statistics on the Bundle’s leader board are updated live, including stats on the amount of donations and the top ten contributors. At the moment, the top three seem to be commercial sites that are using the opportunity to display ads or promotions, and the bundle has taken in over $377,700 altogether. As with the last bundle, Linux users have the highest average donation, followed by Mac and Windows users.
The bundle shares an interesting commonality with the charity gaming e-book bundles that DriveThru put together for Haiti and Pakistan relief—they are only possible because digital media have no per-unit manufacturing cost to speak of, so they can “sell” for as little as they want without printing costs eating up smaller donations.
Can this pay-what-you-want model translate to e-books? It isn’t really clear—and most pay-what-you-want efforts of any kind have not involved charitable donations as part or all of the price of purchase.
