Over on TechCrunch, Paul Carr has posted a piece called “NSFW: Free as in ‘my publisher will disown me after I pirate my book on TechCrunch’”. (“NSFW” seems to be the column name; the content of this particular column seems to be entirely SFW, with the possible exception of the word “whore”.)
Carr begins by talking about Stephen Covey and his decision to sell exclusively Kindle via Rosetta, claiming he still had the e-book rights since his 1989 contract pre-dates anyone even knowing what an e-book was. (Simon & Schuster disagrees of course.)
He also mentions Cory Doctorow’s habit of giving his e-books away for free, and insisting that his audiobooks carry no DRM. This is all a prelude to explaining his own decision.
Carr already had a US-only Kindle edition of his e-book, since he still owns the US rights to his books and was free to make his own arrangements. However, that meant it was unavailable to people who don’t own a Kindle. “In most cases I end up emailing them a PDF—a distribution model that doesn’t really scale.”
Since his print version had been available for 18 months, and no American publisher was on the horizon, Carr figured he might as well give the book away. The only problem was that he only had the US rights, and he could not stop people outside the US from downloading the book.
Then his agent told him to do it anyway, since he was allowed to publish in the US and it wasn’t his fault if people elsewhere downloaded it. When he checked with his publicist, she said that his European e-publisher Hachette was not terribly happy about it, but could not exactly stop him either.
So Carr is making electronic versions of his book Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license in PDF, HTML, and DocStoc form. See the article for links.
It is great to see more people coming to the conclusion that giving away their e-books is the decent and beneficial thing to do! I hope that it works as well for him as well as it has for Cory Doctorow and Baen.
