“‘You browse in a bookstore by flipping pages—why wouldn’t you do it online?’ said Carol Schneider, a spokeswoman for Random House. ‘Are you really going to print out 400 pages online? I don’t think so. We figured people would use it for sampling.'” – Baltimore Sun.
The TeleRead take: Some 15,000 people downloaded freebies of the entire text of Charles Bock‘s Beautiful Children, the bestseller that Random offered at no cost on the Web for three days. Old news to TeleBlog readers. Still, it’s good to see the Mainstream Media continuing to write 
on this, and some interesting stats come out in the Sun piece. Novelist M.J. Rose, for example, observes that 500 books are published in one day, some 85 percent with less than $2,500 for marketing. The big issue, of course, is what happens after the public become jaded—especially when e-books are as easy to read as p-books.
Reminder: The TOR giveaways are still on. Freebie of the moment is Tobias Buckell‘s Crystal Rain. He writes SF and speculative fiction.
Technorati Tags: Random House,TOR,Tobias Buckness,Crystal Rain
Huh?
They figure people won’t “print out” all those pages??
Yeah, they’re right. Haven’t they heard that people can read without printing things out?
When I read things like this, I wonder who in New York is smoking the funny stuff.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
According to a press release from SoftBank Mobile, the Japanese service provider has secured an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to Japan this year. The deal will ensure the iPhone’s first official access in Japan’s market.