It's not hard to find an insightful, enthusiastic essay on emerging publishing and digital reproduction issues... from within the intellectual property savvy tech publishing community. (Publisher Tim Oreilly wrote Piracy is Progessive Taxation almost three years ago!)
But this week on his co-edited Radar blog, Tim (we're cool like that) wrote about an article that appears in The Book Standard, a Nielsen BookScan-centric site. (Stephen King, Judith Regan... They're not exactly beating the drum for the Long Tail.)
In Buying the Cow, Though the Milk is Free, Booksense has a balanced discussion of unpaid digital downloads of books, addressing both piracy concerns, and marketing boosts. The verdict in this article? Free digital downloads don't detract from sales.
According to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Doctorow’s editor at Tor Books, most first-time sci-fi novels sell between 2,500 and 5,000 copies—if the author is lucky. Since it was published in January of 2003, Down and Out has sold more than 10,000 copies, as reported by Nielsen BookScan, and it’s now in its fifth printing. Doctorow attributes a lot of that success to the free publicity the online version of the book has given him.Ok, so free downloads don't sabotage book sales. Very cool. But given that even Cory Doctorow describes himself as a "mid-list writer struggling to break in and break out," it's fair to say that the "marketing tool" argument can only apply to so many situations. That said, it's great that alternative distibution models are getting through to the mainstream publishing world.
...according to O’Reilly, a new form of publishing is on the way. “We have looked to the future. There are a lot of opportunities to reinvent what we do, but if we spend all our time protecting what we used to do, then we can’t build the future.”
- original version of photo appears at http://www.geocities.com/cobb_media/adobebookshop.html. Post-production scribbles added by michclp. The shelf in question was part of a great art show, There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World, at Adobe Books, in San Francisco, CA, USA. Endless. Coverage. Everywhere.
