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Selling books by giving them away
Author Cory Doctorow's experience shows the merits of Creative Commons licenses - and offers a glimpse on the future of publishing.
by Bruno Giussani
21 June 2005
For a couple of weeks now my last small book "Storia di @" (in Italian) has been available for free download under a Creative Commons license. I am not totally sure (and it is trivial anyway) but I believe it's a first for a Swiss author, and maybe even for an Italian one.
It's just an experiment, but here is what inspired me to take this step. I've recently heard science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow read a few pages from his next book, "Somebody comes to town - Somebody leaves town", which will be published in July. Just for the record: In a chapter, a couple of young people who are trying to set up a public (free) wi-fi network in a fictional town called Kensington meet with an executive from an established telecom company. The discussion is hilarious, and sounds scarily authentic: it's a shock of two worlds.
Doctorow, who lives in London but travels frequently to Switzerland, is a skilled and inspiring writer, and is also a vocal advocate of Internet freedoms. He is the kind of guy who could (and did, last Winter) stand on a box at Speakers Corner (the Hyde Park square where anyone can go and tell whatever (s)he pleases) trying to explain to passers-by, in easy words, the intricacies of digital rights management and the risks inherent in taking a restrictive approach to online copyright.
When I met him (during an event at the GDI in Rüschlikon) Doctorow told me that when "Somebody", his third book, will be released in a few weeks, it will be immediately available for free on his website (craphound.com). The reader will have the choice of buying it or downloading it for free, under a Creative Commons license, which states that the book can be freely redistributed, or even rewritten or adapted, as long as it is not for commercial purposes and the original copyright holder is properly acknowledged (creativecommons.org).
If you're shaking your head because that looks like such an obvious choice (why pay if you can get the book for free and even send it to your friends?), well, consider this: Doctorow's first book, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", can be downloaded for free on the website in twenty-four different formats (from PDF, HTML and ASCII to Palm, eBook, Newton, Psion, you name them: there is even one for the iPod). The average first run of a similar science-fiction book in English is of 4000 copies sold. "Down and Out" has been downloaded half a million times, and has sold 10'000 copies in hardcover, more than double the average, and 20'000 copies in paperback.
I (obviously) don't expect to have the same commercial success by putting my booklet up for free download under a CC license: I'm just hoping that, by observing what happens with it, I can learn a bit more about the future of publishing in a digital world. The basic idea behind this approach (Doctorow is not the only one adopting it) is that "if I give away the book for free, some of them will buy it". Hardcore fans will purchase it anyway, but by distributing it so liberally he has been able to attract whole new readerships, worldwide, at a customer acquisition cost close to zero.
Not only has Doctorow sold more books by giving it away for free, but his notoriety has soared as a result, bringing in what he calls "lateral revenues": writing assignments for magazines, speaking engagements, and so on. "I'm not a naïve activist: I'm a businessman who wants to make the maximum of money from his writing", he says. Someday there will be a purely electronic business model. In the meantime, letting people download the book for free, he suggests, creates a marketing and usage virtuous cycle. "In recommending a book to a friend, usually I would try to describe it; but if I have the file, I can highlight some paragraphs and e-mail it to him", he says. "I may own the book but be unwilling to take it to the beach to avoid ruining the tome: but if I have the file and can print a couple of chapters, I won't be worried about sand and water". Recently a reader wrote him: "I had your book in my Palm for weeks, got stuck in an airport, read all of it, and then went out and bought your other book".
Doctorow: "Print is good. Electronic is good. But both of them is so much better".
(copyright 2005 Bruno Giussani)
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