Cory Doctorow says free downloads increase sales
No big secret there. Cory has been on the forefront of this movement, giving away free downloads of every single book he publishes. We’re obvious supporters of this methodology, and are proud to have an audio version of his book Eastern Standard Tribe in our repository of free audiobooks.
Cory writes for Locus Magazine (and lots of other places), and his column Free(konomic) E-books was recently released online. Cory staunchly defends not only the his right to release his books as free downloads, but launches into the real-life positive effects he and others have seen from doing so. He makes a great citation:
Speaking of Tim O’Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O’Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book — and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O’Reilly’s conclusion: downloads didn’t cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched
I can’t find the study Cory is mentioning, Cory’s comments themselves are worthy of a read — regardless which side of the fence you sit on. Well said, Cory!
