The hottest literary news of the year...[is] the sudden surge of writers giving away their books for free online. Not unpublished books by wannabe writers, but published, critically acclaimed books by award-winning writers.
The trend began a few years ago with Cory Doctorow, a Canadian globetrotter and co-editor of one of the world's most popular websites, BoingBoing.net. Doctorow publishes his novels and short-story collections with Tor and other large publishing houses, but he also offers the books for free download on his personal website, www.craphound.com, in text, PDF and audio files, as well as any other digital format you can think of.
Doctorow assumes he loses a few sales of the print versions of his books by offering such freebies, but he figures he makes more in the long run by all the attention his work gets from being easily accessed and passed around online.
It's an assumption that's backed up by the experiences of other writers. Canada's Peter Watts recently released his latest book, Blindsight, a tale of humanity's first contact with aliens, to tepid sales. The book had an initial print run of 3,700 copies, and there were no plans for more....
But after Watts released Blindsight for free online, sales skyrocketed and rave reviews flooded the Internet. The book has since gone into multiple printings and been nominated for prestigious awards, including the Hugo award....
[Quoting Watts:] "I figured I was faced with a choice between a book which tanked commercially and nobody read, or a book that tanked commercially but which everyone could read for free....Having the typical novelist's ego, I figured I'd take a shot at fame if I couldn't have the money. I posted the whole thing online in both PDF and HTML formats, and held my breath." ...
"It turns out I have fans in Russia, South America, Romania, all sorts of places where the dead-tree edition would never have shipped," he says. "And a small, but nontrivial fraction of these folks leave anywhere from $5 to $50 in my online tip jar, even though they're under absolutely no obligation to do so. The smallest donation I've ever received is significantly more than what I'd take home from the sale of one traditional copy. So I'm not complaining." ...
PS: Darbyshire also tells the story of David Wellington who provided OA to his novel (Monster Island) in order to snag a publisher, and succeeded.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/09/2007 03:12:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
