That being said, I think that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that overall making some works freely available does help sales. Lets face it, the Music industry made money for decades by letting radio stations broadcast their product at very low costs. Baen has also proven the concept in the publishing industry — Both David Weber and Eric Flint (Two of Baen’s best selling authors) have effectively made all of their baen books freely available through either the Baen Free Library and the CD’s that grant permission to copy and redistribute the work. While noticing a simple coralation might be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, after a while, if you get enough coralation, it is reasonable to deduce there is some connection.

Ultimately, I think we need to revisit the role of intellectual property law in our society. The ultimate reason for intellectual property is for the works to enter the public domain. Borrowing characters, plot lines, and even segments of text from others can be integral to the creation of new works. Our current system prevents not only sharing works, but the creation of new works based on old works. Imagine if we will for a moment, a world where Shakespeare’s works were still under the control of Shakespeare’s family… I wonder if we would have had some of the wonderful productions that have kept Shakespeare alive… I wonder if we would even know who Shakespeare was?

–
Bill

Book piracy and plagerism were a issue in shakespeare time, but it never really took on(apart from the used book and library scene) the way music and movie bootlegging happened in the 80ies.

Or put in another way the content industries have never really been seriusly hurt by freeloading. Yes there might be some lost revenue but nothing of a catastrophic scale.

This leads directly back to Eric Flint’s “spillage” concept. It is well known that “free trials” are an effective sales pitch. In the non digital world the cost of a free trial can be significant (how much does it cost to provide scent samples for example?) but in the internet age the free trial costs almost nothing, Thus the question should not about whether there are free-loaders but whether there are sufficient paying punters to provide a decent return. If there is enough revenue then it doesn’t matter whether there are a bunch of freeloaders as well.

I also note that the opaqueness of the publishing trade hurts them. Most people understand that if they want more of Author X’s works then they have to buy Author X’s books. What people don’t always grasp is how much money ends up in Author X’s bank account and thus how many books need to be sold in order for Author X to remain a writer and not take up a job at MacDonalds. I think it wouldn’t hurt if epublishers had clear definitions such as
first N books -publisher 100% (author received an advance meet costs of editing etc.)
next M books – publisher 50% author 50%
thereafter – publisher 20% author 80%
and a hint as to where the sales have got to (as in are we still in the N zone? the N-M zone?)

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com