Chris Webb

Many publishers are struggling with the idea of free content, and how it fits into their traditional business strategy. Square peg, round hole – the model needs to change, but that’s another post. When it comes to electronic content, the issue of DRM arises as well – how do you protect your IP while trusting your readers?

We have experimented on both fronts. For example, our electronic Wrox Blox are DRM-free, and we give away some portion of almost every book we publish. We have made entire books available online for free, and Robert Scoble’s and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations was written online.

Like their distributor, O’Reilly, did back in March 2006, publisher No Starch Press is experimenting with free e-books. Leander Kahney’s Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod have been seeded via BitTorrent and are now sitting atop the Pirate Bay’s Top e-book list.

We’ll be watching to see if making the electronic versions of these books available for free has any effect whatsoever on book sales. And if there is some noticeable effect whether it’s a positive one.

I’ll be interested to see if there is a sales boost for these titles. The O’Reilly experiment did not show a boost in print copies when the free e-book was announced. In fact, there was little effect on sales at all, although they started the experiment at the end of the book’s life as sales were already declining. However, there was a slight increase in book sales which dropped immediately after the announcement of the free e-book.

I’ve been in publishing for just over 20 years and my training has not been to give books away. But I think there’s something to this and logic tells me that if we increase the visibility of our titles, we’ll sell more books.

I’m not sure the availability of the e-book on BitTorrent is increased visibility. In fact, I would be very surprised if the book was not already available via a torrent before its “official” release into the wild. It is my experience that most books eventually end up on filesharing sites at some point.

What do you think? Have you ever purchased a book after getting the entire thing for free online?