A Novel Solution for Lagging Book Sales: Give 'em Away

"Does the book industry want to get Napstered?," Jack Shafer is wondering over at Slate. Shafer looks at publishers' beef with Amazon on pricing of e-books (Amazon favors a $9.99 standard price; publishers, predictably, want the option to vary prices upward) and says, "Authors and book agents also fret that low e-book prices will "cannibalize" hardcover sales…"

But what if they gave the books away for free? As TechDirt noted last year, giving readers a digital taste might actually improves sales. That was the case for author Paul Coelho, who offers free electronic copies of most of his books. He attributes the fact that he sells 1 million books a year in Russia to the digital downloads, according to a Fortune report. "It's very difficult to read a book on your computer," Coelho said at the time. "People start printing out their own copies. But if they like the book, after reading 30-40 pages they just go out and buy it."

No wonder more publishers like HarperCollins, which has made many books available for free seem to be catching on to this idea. John Hodgman gave away free audiobooks of his The Area of My Expertise (Dutton Adult) on iTunes in 2006 and Charles Bock's free digital downloads of his debut novel Beautiful Children (Random House) didn't seem to hurt the book's sales: It cracked the New York Times best sellers list.

This month brings Pantheon Books' free e-copy of Jill Ciment's new novel Heroic Measures via Oprah.com (starting July 20th) and Chris Anderson's free iTunes audiobook download of his new pro-free tome Free (Hyperion). Readers can also get a totally free copy of the book on Scribd.

Of course Anderson couldn't not make at least part of his "free market" tract free—the whole book is a celebration of giving away content for free after all—but the give-aways don't seem to be hurting his sales: Free is currently the 33rd best-selling non-fiction book Amazon. It's also number 1 in the Business & Investing sub-list where it happens to sit right on top of Outliers, the most recent book by Malcolm Gladwell who recently panned Anderson in The New Yorker two weeks ago.

Looks like for now, "free" wins.