We are seeing three trends that are making free an important threat to the future of books -
- The availability of literally millions of free public domain books.
- Independent Authors giving away free books to get recognition and build credibility and sell books down the line.
- Publishers offering free books to create sales of other books by the author – usually later books in a series of which the free book is the first.
There are lots of ways to justify all of these – it’s marketing, public domain books should be free, it gets more people to read, and so forth.
Unfortunately we have to deal with reality and not what people think will happen.
Free is just a means to an End and it’s not working as planned
Free Books are just marketing -
- eReader companies want to offer a million free books to get sales.
- Authors want to offer a book free to hook readers and get them to buy more.
However, it’s changing user perception of the value of books.
Free is overwhelming Paid Books and training users to expect Free
Except for the Kindle Store, every single eBook Store has way more free books than paid books. Plus you have indie authors all over the Internet offering free books.
- If only 20% of books are paid people begin to wonder.
- If Oliver Twist is free how do you justify charging $10 for a new book?
- Users are getting trained to expect free books – it’s going to be ridiculously difficult to change their behavior and get them to start paying for books.
- Authors might be offering just one or two of their books for free – However, every author is doing it.
While free eBooks are doing a great job of devaluing books, and teaching people to expect free books, they are not guaranteed to work the way they were intended.
Free Books are not guaranteed to lead to Paid Book Sales
The Internet is this great medium that takes greedy people and destroys them.
Everyone is rushing to give away free books and lock in a huge future revenue stream. Well, they’re just killing that future revenue stream.
The Freemium model doesn’t really work. Especially not online where customers have a lot of leverage.
It sounds picture perfect -
- Offer part of your product offering for free.
- Get millions of people to try it.
- All of them start buying your other products.
However, all it does is train millions of people to get stuff for free. They then turn around and use some other company’s free offering.
Freemium would work if there wasn’t infinite competition online or if every company was intelligent. That’s not the case.
Giving away Free Content/Product is not a business
It’s not just me – the pointlessness of serving people who don’t pay you for the hope of Future profits is obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 5 minutes.
- Broadstuff points out that ‘if you aren’t paying, you aren’t a customer’.
- Philip Wainwright at ZDNet weighs in.
- Here’s a full PDF study on how Freemium isn’t working for Software as a Service companies.
This is exactly what newspapers did – they were serving people who weren’t their customers. This is what Authors and Publishers and eBook Retailers are beginning to do.
Free eBooks are a means to THE END
What free eBooks are actually doing is leading to the end of books. We are at the beginning of the end of books.
- To market books authors and publishers and eReader companies are giving away books.
- To make money middle-men are busy finding ways to convince authors and publishers to embrace free based models.
- Public domain books are already available. Orphan Works might be available soon.
- Users are beginning to figure out that they might be able to get away without paying for books.
You see this in various forms – users asking for $2 ebooks, people removing DRM and sharing, users who want to share eBooks like they share paper books, and other signs.
The Bleak Future for Books
You get two basepoints -
- 0 cents for a book over the Internet.
- 10 cents for a book delivered wirelessly to your eReader.
You also get a lot of ethereal things people will be told to be happy with -
- Authors with recognition and getting readers.
- Publishers with being gatekeepers.
- eReader companies with selling eReaders.
- Advertisers (if any) with running advertisements.
Why are we moving towards this future?
Out of Competition and Due to Greed companies and authors are setting unrealistic expectations for readers
Company A and Company B are competing for eReader sales.
- Company A has the lead and the arguably better eReader.
- Company B counters by offering a million free books.
- What it really does is decrease the possibility that either company can create a viable eBook revenue stream down the line.
Author A and Author B are competing for readers.
- Author A takes a viewpoint that users will really like.
- He says readers should get books without DRM and for free and authors should be happy to just be read.
- This leads to a lot of recognition and users buy his book out of reciprocation.
- However, he is devaluing books. Not as many people buy books and they pick him not because his work is the best.
It’s easy to assume it’s all altruistic – However, there are elements of competition and greed underlying the whole ‘I want to sacrifice myself for you’ angle.
Users, though, believe what they hear and add on things from their own wish-list -
- Information wants to be free.
- eBooks should be half the price and still shareable.
- There should be no DRM of any sort.
- Authors should be happy to get donations.
- We should be able to read books and then decide what to pay for them.
And lots of other ridiculous things they would never agree to for their own line of work.
The Internet is a great place to try and fool everyone at the same time. It’s an even better place to get fooled by everyone.
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | free taking over, impact of free books
As someone who has worked in publishing (including an ebook service for engineers and specialty online content for the financial markets), and as someone who has struggled with free vs. paid for those companies, I found myself nodding in agreement with many of your points. But the irony was not lost on me when I eagerly clicked and downloaded the ‘Freemium Isn’t Working’ report–for free.
Well, speaking at least for myself, the ‘free’ books I’ve purchased have led to HUGE gains for the publishers. Most (if not all) of these free books were initial books in a series (in some cases, ongoing). Having read the first free book (and enjoyed it), I then proceeded to buy every other book in the series. These are books and authors that I *never* would have even noticed or tried in the past.
I don’t see how you can say that this isn’t working for publishers. If the books they’re giving away aren’t any good or are the only book from that author I might say you have a point. It’s all about readers discovering new authors and content and providing an enticing way of getting them to fully appreciate that content where they might not normally do so.
Patrick – we’re at the beginning of free first books.
We get 10-20 free books a month. Once the competition wakes up to the benefit there’ll be so many free books that people will have less time for paid books.
There’s also the chance that we get a sustainable solution i.e. lots of people behaving as you do.
That’s the hope – However, as more and more people start offering free that scenario gets less and less likely.
If the authors with free books only wrote standalone novels (which is pretty rare these days), then I’d agree with you, but if I read the first book in a trilogy [for eg] and it’s any good, I’m definitely going to want to read the rest [as well as follow that author].
I agree with Patrick on this one, though I definitely recognize the inherent dangers of too much “free.”
The thing about books is, they aren’t all interchangeable… or they shouldn’t be. If they are, then that’s the real problem.
If someone reads a book I wrote, they should recognize it as distinctive from books other people wrote. And if they like “my” work enough, then they aren’t going to read some other book by someone else just because it’s free, if mine happens to not be. If they’re a fan of my work, they want to read ME.
There is plenty of free stuff I consume, but… there are times what I want costs money. If I have the money and the thing is important enough to me, then I buy it.
This holds for entertainment and books as well. Readers have always been able to read totally for free… Libraries. And if a library didn’t have a book you wanted, there is inter-library loan.
So to me, that is the issue. Not if it’s free or costs money, but that each author HAS to find THEIR audience, and they have to be writing something either earth shattering enough, or just gripping enough that readers want THEM and not their competition.
The wonderful thing is that “everybody” will never behave in one given way. There will always be people who know piracy is dishonest and won’t do it. There will always be people who are willing to pay for what they want instead of taking something else kind of the same but not really from someone else for free. I think it’s the individual authors who have to be careful about this, in the case of indie authors, and devaluing their OWN work.
We can never control the behavior of everybody else. But I’m willing to bet that there no matter how much free stuff there is, if you really love an author’s work, you’ll pay for it rather than reading someone else for free just because it’s free.
In fact, an argument could be made for too much free devaluing Free. i.e. free isn’t as sexy anymore when everybody’s doing it, and maybe people will stop seeing it as the holy grail and start looking at the value of each thing on an independent thing-by-thing basis.
Interesting. So far, I’ve downloaded a whole bunch of books for free – but haven’t bought other books by the same authors. Mostly because my list of ‘want to read/already have purchased’ is so huge, that I’ve been pushing that up and haven’t even had the time to read the freebies.
Pretty much, I download them hoping I’ll have the time, but buy what I’m interested in and read those first. So at least for me, no, freebies aren’t working.
I did not buy any books for myself last year. I bought some for my son for homeschool, but none for me.
I bought a Kindle in December, and even though it is loaded up with lots of free books, I have also purchased a number of them for myself.