Sunday, May 4, 2008

Free content can make money!

Old Man's WarCover of
Old Man's War
Image via Wikipedia
Readers here (all 6 of you?) know I read John Scalzi's blog. A while back he talked about a new book by Scott Sigler, "Infected" and gave a link to get a free PDF of the book. (That link is no longer valid by the way...)

That's nice of John, to hook his readership up that way... but he himself is no stranger to it. You could say he got his start that way (as, arguably, Cory Doctorow did as well).

So now it comes out that it's possible to get a podcast of Infected if you follow this link.

I suspect that while there will be takers, and lots, it will also drive sales of the book. Why? because I'm sure I'm not the only person who got hooked on Scalzi by reading a free (unless you wanted to donate something, which I did) copy of "Old Man's War", or on Doctorow by reading a free copy of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". Although horror isn't my favorite subgenre of SF, the book was good and I plan to keep following the series

What about you? Do you read free books? Do you find yourself buying a copy of the book you got for free? If so, what motivates you?

(Note, I mean free as in beer here, the content is not freely licensed... in particular the image cover is used as a claimed Fair Use for review/discussion purposes)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am not that optimistic... I remember when Dilbert's Scott Adams tried to donate one of his books in PDF on his blog (in early 2006) he noticed no increase in sales of any of his books (out of thousands of free downloads).

Apparently the blog entry is a 404 now, I only have my memory as a proof :).