Dipping their huge little toe in the waters

If you're a writer you really can't have missed the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments surrounding the whole Pixel-stained Technopeasant, "give it away for free" vs "pirates are going to deep-six the publishing industry" controversy. Really, for the past three years (at least in public) the partisans of both sides have clashed. Often. And with great bruhaha. As a side line to this discussion is the "electronic books will kill the dead tree versions real soon now" concept (my response, "Yeah, and we're going to have that paperless office RSN").

Many of us in SF/F who believe that there is benefit to offering free samples point to Baen's Free Library as an example of success (that link point to Baen's Universe where Eric Flint has been holding court on some of this issues). Main stream media points to Harper-Collins tentative steps in the field (this is a note to those conservative friends of mine who proclaim loudly that the main stream press always gets their side "wrong," the msp gets everything "wrong").

Hopefully NPR will post the whole transcript of the story, it's really worth examining. In case they don't post the whole thing, here's some of the highlights. With the H-C test you can't download the books, you have to read them off the site. Sales of the dead-tree version of the books they've tested have been significantly higher. Neil Gaiman's American Gods (which is an excellent book, BTW, I highly recommend it) saw a sales increase right after they released the electronic version (the book has been out for five years, I think). Also, while some people read the whole book online, most read 20-40 pages. By that point, the thought process goes, they know if they want to buy the book or not. But just in case anybody missed it, hard copy sales went up for the titles they released for free. Nothing succeeds like success.

In fairness, they have only tested a miniscule number of titles (compared to the H-C catalog). Their release isn't like Tor Books experiment (which gives you the whole book in a number of formats you can read offline). The difference here is the H-C authors are all BNA (big name authors) who have typically had the most to lose by giving away free books (under the "worst thing for a new author isn't pirates, it's obscurity" line of reasoning).