Free Books: An Interview with Chris Anderson

The book industry is not in collapse, thankfully, but that has not stopped hundreds of authors (and a few publishers) from conducting their own experiments with Free.

The big difference between books and music is that for most people, the superior version is still the one based on atoms, not bits. For all their cost disadvantages, dead trees smeared into sheets still have excellent battery life, screen resolution, and portability, to say nothing about looking lovely on shelves. But the market for digital books—audiobooks, ebooks, and Web downloads—is growing fast, mostly to satisfy demands that physical books cannot, from the need for something you can consume while driving to the need for something you can get instantaneously, wherever you are.

Most free book models are based on freemium, one way or another. Whether it's a limited-time free download of a few chapters, or the whole thing in a well-formatted PDF available forever, the digital form is a way to let the maximum number of people sample the book, in the hopes that some will buy.

For example, Neil Gaiman, the science fiction writer, gave away American Gods as a digital download for four weeks in 2008. The usual fears and objections were presented at first: that it would cannibalize sales in stores or, at the other extreme, that a limited availability was counterproductive since by the time many people heard about it, it would be gone. The second worry is hard to check, but the first turned out to be mistaken. Not only did American Gods become a best seller, but sales of all of Gaiman's books in independent bookstores rose by 40 percent over the period the one title was available for free. Eighty-five thousand people sampled the book online, reading an average of forty-five pages each. More than half said they didn't like the experience of reading online, but that was just an incentive to buy the easier-to-read hardcover. Gaiman then gave away his next children's book, The Graveyard, as free online readings in streamed video, a chapter at a time, and that, too, became a best seller.

For nonfiction books, especially those on business topics, free books are often more closely modeled after free music. The low-marginal-cost digital book is really marketing for the high-marginal-cost speech or consulting gig, just as free music is marketing for concerts. You can have the abundant, one-size-fits-all version of the author's ideas for free, but if you want those ideas tailored for your own company, industry conference, or investors meeting, you'll have to pay for the author's scarce time. (Yes, that's my model, too. Speakers Bureau details are on my Web site!)

This can even work for physical books. Consultants often buy thousands of their own volumes of strategic wisdom to distribute for free to potential clients, a tactic so common that best-seller lists now have special methods to spot and ignore these bulk sales. In Europe, newspapers sometimes offer small paperback books, sometimes in serial form, free with their issues on the newsstand, which helps drive newspaper sales. And authors increasingly offer free review copies to any blogger who wants one—the “Long Tail of book reviewers”—on the grounds that such word of mouth is well worth the few dollars each copy costs.

Like everything else in Free, this is not without controversy. Howard Hendrix, then vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, has called authors who give away their books “webscabs,” and there are publishers who still have their doubts that free books stimulate more demand than they satisfy (sometimes based on experience). But in a world of shrinking bookstore shelf space and disappearing newspaper book review sections, authors are keen to try anything that can help them build an audience. As publisher Tim O'Reilly puts it, “the enemy of the author is not piracy, but obscurity.” Free is the lowest-cost way to reach the largest number of people, and if the sample does its job, some will buy the “superior” version. As long as readers continue to want their books in atoms form, they'll continue to pay for them.