Follow Up On Paulo Coelho Embracing Pirating His Own Books

from the seems-to-be-working dept

Back in January, we wrote about how best selling author Paulo Coelho was happily pirating his own books via BitTorrent, noting just how much it was increasing sales. Since he couldn't initially convince publishers to go along with it, he set up a site that pretended it was from a fan giving away various translations of his book, even though it was really run by him. He admitted it in a speech in January that got his efforts a lot more attention. TorrentFreak has checked in with Coelho to see how things have gone since he admitted to pirating his own books. Not surprisingly, the increased attention has helped drive even more sales -- even though the attention was all about how people could get his books for free. Because of that, a couple of his books are back on the NY Times Bestseller list. It also resulted in his publisher, Harper Collins, being a bit more willing to embrace the experiment, putting a new Coelho book online each month. Of course, as we pointed out at the time, this was still a really crippled and annoying-to-read way of offering free books online, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

What may be even more interesting is that Coelho isn't sitting back and leaving things as is. He continues to experiment. For example, rather than selling the movie rights to one of his books, he's running an experiment to have fans make a movie out of the book, dividing up the work. Since the book involves multiple perspectives, each person is expected to choose one perspective and film it. Coelho and his team will then piece together the movie, awarding 3,000 euros to the best film segments, and also offering up 1,500 euros to whoever composes music to go with the film. This reminds me a bit of Jonahtan Lethem's experiments with making a story of his freely available to movie makers. Hopefully we'll be seeing more such creative endeavors going forward.

Filed Under: books, movies, paulo coelho, piracy, publishing

Publishers Jumping On The Free Book Bandwagon (Somewhat, But Not Fully)

from the and-you-thought-free-was-evil... dept

For many, many years, Sci-Fi publisher Baen Books has offered free downloadable books, and has found it to be a good way to generate more interest and sales for its authors. It appears that many others are starting to realize this as well. We've recently seen unknown authors and best-selling authors both embrace the concept, while pointing out that obscurity is a much bigger threat to their writing than piracy. Now, it appears that other publishers are beginning to catch on. Sci-Fi publisher Tor is giving away free e-books (apparently with no DRM, either) and the NY Times is now reporting that HarperCollins has decided to start posting free e-books on its website (including a bunch by Paulo Coehlo, the best-selling author who encouraged people to download unauthorized versions of his books). Unfortunately, these "free" e-books are ridiculously limited. They'll only be online for a month -- and you can only view them with a web connection (no downloads allowed). On top of that, the print functionality will be blocked. This seems totally pointless. For most books, it costs more to print out a copy yourself than to just buy the actual book. It's nice to see some additional support for free books, but HarperCollins plans seem akin to the music industry's first forays into online music. That is, they're designed so that the company can say "look, we're doing something!" but are so locked up that very few people will actually be interested.

Filed Under: books, free, publishing
Companies: harpercollins, tor