[Q] All four of your novels are available for free online. Obviously a number of factors would have played a part in this decision. Do you think your motivation was primarily a “business” decision or a “political” one?
[A] I voluntarily throw out some of the copyright that I get automatically just by writing stuff down. I do that for political and economic reasons: I think that the increased scope and duration of copyright are strangling free expression, privacy and innovation, and I think that enabling my fans to trade my words makes me more money. So I get to do the right thing and get paid, which is good.
[Q] Was it easy to find a commercial publisher that supported your decision to make the books available online for free?
[A] I’m generating more sales of my printed books. Sure, giving away ebooks displaces the occasional sale but it’s far more common for a reader to download the book, read some or all of it, and decide to buy the print edition. I’ve given away more than half a million digital copies of my award-winning first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and that sucker has blown through five print editions (yee-HAW!), so I’m not worried that giving away books is hurting my sales....Giving away books costs me nothing, and actually makes me money. But most importantly, it delivers the very best market-intelligence that I can get. I can use this to be the first writer to figure out what the next writerly business model is. I’m an entrepreneur and I live and die by market intel.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/11/2005 11:21:00 AM.
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.
