Another Free Book Example; Oprah Book Give Away Keeps Actual Sales Strong
from the and-again-and-again-and-again dept
As publishers continue to fight Google over its efforts to scan books for searchability purposes, we're still seeing more and more evidence that free books don't hurt sales, but can actually help them. The latest is that Oprah apparently promoted a year-old Suze Orman book by giving it away for free on her website as a download for 33 hours. 1.1 million people decided to download it. Even though the book was a year old and available for free... it was still the #6 most popular sold book on Amazon.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Lies, All Lies
One little incident like this doesn't prove anything. I don't care how many of these isolated cases you business-hating Communists keep dredging up, you're NEVER going to change the basic REALITY that we in the content industry KNOW FOR A FACT.
Now go away and leave us to try to figure out how to actually make money from our lawsuits...
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LAWL
The point is: old practices will evolve, and you're a dip-shit.
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Re: LAWL
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Re: Lies, All Lies
Away
Fat Man
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That you money grubbing greedy bastards have no care for society.
Now go to hell!
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Re:
Either way I'm snickering.
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Uh
Get Opera to hock every single book google scans and maybe you're onto something.
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Re: Uh
However, this Oprah giveaway proves something that the big content providers don't want people to know. That is, the more people who know about a decent product, the more people are likely to buy it. Big content doesn't want people to realise this as it would be an admission that filesharing doesn't harm them as much as their poor product does...
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Re: Uh
Huh? I never said they were the same thing. I was simply pointing out one single fact: that even if a book is available for free and that fact is *widely known*, it still can sell quite well.
That doesn't change anything else in having to do with authors who promote their books for free, nor does it disprove the idea that people will still buy books even if they're available for free.
What point do you think you're making here?
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Re: Re: Uh
Mike wrote:
I'd say it's pretty obvious: it's the same sort of thing you've come across before, where critics have tried to claim that such a giveaway strategy may work for someone famous, but not for someone not so famous. And then, when someone unknown does it, they then try to claim it won't work for someone better known.
A total denial of the evidence, in other words.
Lawrence "Mr Big Content" D'Oliveiro
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standard arguement..
"Sure, it might work for case [x] but it will never work for case [x+1]"
As you expand the set of [x] where the model is shown to work, they will still always argue that there is a case [x+1] where it has not yet been shown to work and will certainly fail. And somehow the fact that time and time again, examples of previous [x+1] cases are discovered and shown to work simply does not convince them.
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Why Sales are Up
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Re: Why Sales are Up
However, reading a book on a computer isn't the most comfortable. I have some old D&D books in ebook form and it's literally a pain to read them on the computer. You have to keep in approximately the same position to read it; even with a laptop you're still limited in how you can view the screen.
It makes sense to me to offer a free ebook. If the information is useful, I'll buy the real book because it's more portable than a computer (even an ebook reader) and I can read it where-ever and how-ever I want.
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Nice
Its too bad some people won't realize Suze is very smart. I LOVE YOU SUZE (and that guy Lou on your show is a cutie).
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But, but, but...
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suze orman
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Suze's book is available for FREE for a few more hours!
http://www2.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200802/tows_past_20080213.jhtml?promocode=HP24
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mr./mrs who read this
pamoyanan no.165 rt 04/02 panenjoan cicalengka-bandung 40395 indonesia.thanks before...thanks to your attention^_~
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AUTO CONSULTING
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ebooks should be in LIT, PDF, or TXT.
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