Lessig and Doctorow on free e-books
Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford
and author of the new book Free Culture,
is “guest blogger” at Glenn Reynolds’ Slate Blog.
Lessig is making his book available free online under Creative Commons license,
and it is widely available.
In his March 30, 2004 entry,
“Amazon helps free culture,” Lessig writes about this.
The basic assumption is this: (a) ebooks are a poor substitute (just now) for printed books. If that’s true, then there are only two numbers you need to think about to decide whether giving a book away for free makes sense: (1) those who would have bought the book but won’t because the book is now free, and (2) those who would never have seen the book had it not been available for free, but now because they see it, and given assumption (a), they buy it.
The only question a publisher needs to decide is whether (2) is greater than (1): If there are more who will buy it because they see it because it is free and will now buy it because it is free, then making it free makes sense for the publisher.
Cory Doctorow said something similar in his presentation
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
delivered at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004. Cory went a bit further, though:
There’s a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
bringing it home from the store, but that’s the wrong metaphor.
Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
at the cover and reading the blurbs….
Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and “only” ten
thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my
book bought it, I’d be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the
sales are healthy.