Back in the day, specifically the salad days of the electronic boom of the late 90s when I was a reporter at Wired.com covering the publishing beat and ebooks were the hope of the future and digital rights were the spawn of the devil to some of us and the holy grail to others... a few of us believed in giving our books away for free on line. We suggested that no one would read our books all on-line but by putting them out there we'd get people starting them and getting hooked and then buying the paper versions. I was doing it with my self published novel Lip Service in 1998, Douglas Clegg was doing it at the same time with serialized novels and then with a novella and then in March of 2000 Seth Godin did it and got even more attention.
All the naysayers (everyone in traditional publishing) screamed and yelled that it would be the end of us all, but all of us kept offering up the numbers to prove our point: we were selling more not less copies of the books we were also giving away for free. And some of us, like Seth, were making a killing at it.
Well time moves slowly sometimes but it looks like traditional publishing is getting around to what some of us thought all along: give it away and they will come.
Yesterday the NYT reported that Harper Collins will be offering full books free on line to encourage people to take a taste and maybe decide to spring for the whole meal.
It's a great idea. I hope every single publisher follows suit. Quite a few of us have been thinking for a long time, 9 years to be exact, that this is a great way to sell more books and that's something that all of us need.
Sorry you didn't get the shout out you deserved from the Times. They report this stuff like it is actually 'news' as opposed to press releases from big companies...
Posted by: Seth Godin | February 12, 2008 at 08:33 PM
well – what people don't know is that Harper Collins only launched this free online reading site after the bestselling author Paulo Coelho revealed his pirate coelho blog to the world during the DLD conference in Munich last January.
I read the interveiw he gave for Newsweek and can't help to join the dots:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/108715
I doubt Harper Collins would have made such a move without this author's pressure.
Thumbs up for Pirate Coelho!
Posted by: Aart | February 18, 2008 at 04:12 AM