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Free ebooks increase book-sales

Via Boing Boing

Simon sez, “John Hilton, a doctoral candidate in Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, crunched the numbers to determine whether releasing books through Creative Commons and other methods really does benefit authors and publishers. He found that four titles recently released for free by Random House saw an 11 percent increase in sales in the eight weeks after releasing the online copies compared to the eight weeks prior.”

Read more here.

Open Access News had this article where Cory Doctorow talks about the benefits of giving away his book for free.

.. I give away all my books as free, Creative Commons-licensed e-books the same day they go on sale in stores, on the grounds that for most people, a free e-book is more apt to entice them to buy the print book than to substitute for it. But there’s a small minority — mostly other geeks — for whom the e-book is all they want, and who, nevertheless, want to see the writers they enjoy compensated (bless ’em!). They write to me with some variation on, “Can’t I just send you a donation?” And my answer has always been no, because:

  1. I don’t want to have to bookkeep, file taxes on, and otherwise track your $5;
  2. I don’t want to cut my extremely valuable and useful publisher out of the loop;
  3. I don’t want to reduce my print-books’ sell-through rates (which determine advance sizes, print runs, and bookstore orders).

So, traditionally, I asked my readers to compensate me by donating a book to a school or library or halfway house. …As I type this, we’ve given away well over 200 copies to people who really wanted the book. I got the sales number, my publisher got the sale, the library or school got the material, and the reader got to feel like s/he had paid for the value s/he’d received. …

Read more here.

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