Publishers Succeeding With Free eBooks Driving Sales For Other Books
from the there-we-go-again dept
While I'm no fan of the Kindle for a variety of reasons (DRM, lack of real ownership of the books, etc.), it has to be admitted that the device has made ebooks a lot more mainstream than before. And, along with ebooks comes the realization to some publishers that it's now possible to give away some ebooks for free, and use them to promote other books (thanks to William C Bonner for sending this in). What the publishers are discovering is that they can offer up older books that have lost much of their commercial value for free, and it helps drive sales of newer books by the same author. In some cases, they give away the first in a series of books, which has proven to be quite effective. What the publishers are really realizing is that thanks to digital distribution, they can suddenly use the "free" cost of the book to hook people and get them to purchase later books in a series. This is hardly a new idea, of course, but it's great to see more book publishers figuring it out.
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Filed Under: ebooks, free, infinite goods
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Free books at Baen
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Re: Free books at Baen
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Re: Free books at Baen
Jim Baen was a legend. Other publishing houses would do well to emulate his model.
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Re: Re: Free books at Baen
I haven't read a non-Baen book in over a year now, their free offerings alone are a good couple of months reading for slow times at work. :D
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Re: Free books at Baen
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Re: Re: Free books at Baen
In the case of one of John Ringo's books (There will be dragons) it included an audio book version of the story, as well.
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Free e-books
BTW: I'm not sure what you mean by wanting "real ownership of the books", other than you want to take possession of a pile of paper and a small amount of ink. Go green, man! :-)
Thanks for the article.
Dan
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Re: Free e-books
Books have been recalled and removed from these devices at the request of the authors.
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Re: Free e-books
About a month ago, in an interesting twist, George Orwell's 1984 was summarily removed from everyone's Kindle. I believe Amazon offered refunds to everyone that purchased the ebook, though.
It's still disconcerting to hear that you can go through the motions of spending money for an item that you believe you "own" (e.g. at least have the right to keep a readable copy on your Kindle) only to find out that is completely untrue.
In essence, it appears that you only get to buy books at the whim of the publishers. If they change their minds, even far into the future, you will lose the item you've spent your money on. Something to consider before making that purchase.
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But..
Now all you whiny "free doesnt work!!" idiots can just not bother to post, I've got you covered.
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Re: But..
The music business would be fine if the only music traded was 25 years old.
THINK! It's a powerful weapon against your own ignorance.
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They're still under the same copyright as the newer stuff.
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eReader
Barnes & Nobles new eReader section should help speed up this process
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note to self
252 note/entry) Include music, video, e-books, software for free and sale in the specs.
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Re: note to self
254) Include "If you like this you may also like this" based on author/artist/type of. Make additions to the "if you like this" list by the artist/author/etc allowable.
255) browsing the system does not require registration.
256) downloading free "content" does not require registration. This may be problematic and prone to Abuse (Think denial of service attack via downloading) and subject to change.
257) Registration to the system does not require a credit card only purchases do.
258) PayPal like service for transactions on the back end.
259) different paypal like service in each country. Financial, banking, and tax laws are differnt in each country.
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Tor did this for a while
I don't know why they stopped, as it was a really good tool to get people interested in a series or author, such as:
Brandon Sanderson Mistborn, they gave away book 1 and people who follow fantasy also know he will be writing the last book in the wheel of time series, so I had lots of incentive to see how he wrote
Another one was Robin Hobb, I did get the first one for free from Tor and then bought the next two, however I have held off from buying her other two trilogies, because I believe personally she is wrong about a lot of things. She is completely against fan fiction and other appreciation of her work, because she thinks people will confuse it with her work or think she endorses it.
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Baen rocks!
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Baen is tops
Strangely enough, it's these freebies that get me paying more money for my deadtree edition books - having been hooked on them online, there's nothing that beats a paperback for portability and accessibility.
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The fact that I am sailing around the Caribbean where for the most part there are no bookstores leaves me with Amazon or Barnes and Noble as my book connection. Which would be OK f the interface was the sort that made it easy to figure out what books I moght be interested in as the various online models are somewhat lacking.
So I have been getting a lot of free e-books and no big surprise but now having been able to download various books I find that my Amazon book orders have seriously increased as now when I find a new book I like in free ebook form I find that 75% of the time I buy it in paperback (I still don't enjoy reading books on my computer) more importanly for the author and publisher I find if I like a book by a given author I tend to buy other books by the author I did the free ebook download.
I keep pretty good records and last year I spent about $300 on books. So far this year I have spent nearly $1000 almost all of it due to being hipped to authors and books by free ebooks... Do the math!
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