Perhaps information really does want to be free. Citing the desire to create new revenue streams for authors, mega-publisher HarperCollins has announced the first free Web-based, ad-supported, full-text business book. Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own by Bruce Judson is now available on the author’s Web site, where an affiliate link to Amazon, not the publisher, can also be found. Not only can the book be read at the site, but it can also be searched. HarperCollins Publishers is calling the project a test of a new business model. Some self-published authors also offer ad-supported books online, but HarperCollins’ move is the first by a major publisher. For now, the project is limited to the one book, with publisher and author sharing the advertising revenue. The author’s contract was specially amended to accommodate the arrangement. Company spokesperson Erin Crum said: “We are exploring how online advertising programs can add value for publishers and authors. The results will be measured by the income generated through ads, number of page views and visitors to the site, and by sales of books from the site. If successful, this kind of digital product might be a new format that supplements the paperback edition.”...HarperCollins has previously indicated the desire to control its own digital assets rather than let others scan and store them. (Until now, the company has sent its books to others for digitizing, such as Amazon, which produces Search Inside the Book pages for its online bookstore.) Nevertheless, Go It Alone! is hosted not on HarperCollins’ servers but on the author’s, which are under the control of a Web site company. The company says that they will evaluate where future free books should be served from on a case-by-case basis....On Judson’s site, the book, displayed in HTML rather than as a PDF, is flanked by clickable Yahoo! text ads. Because the content of these contextual ads reflects that of the page on which they appear, some of them may not be attractive to readers....Ad-supported digital books spark the same fears in publishers and authors as other types of digital content. If they are pirated and widely distributed without the ads, revenue will be lost.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/13/2006 04:15:00 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.
