last book i've read - Credit: Ranoush on Flickr (CC BY-SA)
A BYU graduate study conducted a study that suggests that releasing gratis ebooks increases sales.
On March 4 of this year, Random House announced that it would release five books for free through its science fiction portal, all of which came in downloadable PDF files (among other formats). Hilton recorded the before and after book sales and found that “one of the five books has had zero sales in 2009. So no sales before or after the free version. But the other four books all saw significant sales increases after the free versions were released. In total, combined sales of the five books were up 11%. Together they sold 4,633 copies the 8 weeks prior to being released free and 5,155 copies the eight weeks after being released.”
If you read the article, you will notice that it is very good at pointing out the flaws in a study like this. The real problem is that this is a promotion of sorts. If you were to release all the books for free, would you see an increase in physical book sales? I’d like to think so, but maybe we’ll never know.
May 12th, 2009 at 22:01
The thing to keep in mind here is that there is a difference between a physical book and an e-book that does not really exist for most other things eligible for copyright today, such as music and even movies and TV shows. Reading an e-book is not the same as reading a physical book, and it is far more difficult to transform an e-book into a physical book to get the same experience. We don’t yet have portable, easy, and cheap personal DIY publishing services that we can effortlessly put an e-book into and get an actual book, and printing every single page on letter-sized paper and binding them together is nowhere near the same experience. For this reason, reading a physical book is not, and will not likely become for the near future (although this can change as technology progresses), the same as reading an e-book.
Given this, books in the physical form can have more value to customers than an e-book, up to the point of customers actually buying the physical copy because the e-book does not suit their reading needs or desires. A similar analogy can be made to the customers of vinyl records. Vinyl is still not so easy to make that anyone can plausibly do it, so taking lossless PCM or FLAC files and making your own record without special technology is not yet possible. Because vinyl customers often see a difference between compact discs and other digital formats and vinyl, they might not consider these formats to be acceptable alternatives.
It is for these reasons that I can see sales of physical copies increasing with this promotional method. Even with the advent of e-book readers, some will still prefer the “dead tree” format for reading books, for the reasons I mentioned above. This group may or may not decrease with time and technology advances, but it is this group that will ensure that books in the physical form will not die out completely.
May 12th, 2009 at 22:05
Interesting, because I always considered books the more difficult to create a free business model for. With music, you can make money off of concerts, etc.
May 12th, 2009 at 23:17
Not necessarily more difficult. Just different. Some markets require a bigger business model overhaul than others, and some require almost no change at all.
Certainly e-books can cause physical books to make less money than before, simply due to the fact that physical books are no longer the sole method of distribution, but I don’t believe that e-books will usurp that market completely due to the differences between the two formats. In a similar vein, movie theaters continue to see business despite 25 years of home video, even though many choose to not go to the theater and wait for the home release instead.
October 17th, 2009 at 7:38
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