TeleRead poll: Will you buy a p-edition of a free Creative Commons book you love?

I truly believe that the model of giving away eBooks in hopes that people will buy the pBook version is viable only in the short term (not that I have anything against authors who succeed with it). Let’s face it, either eBooks are the way to go or they aren’t. If they aren’t, then the creative commons is a marketing gimmic. If they are, then why would I want to stuff my house with overpriced paper?

When e-mail first hit the corporate world, many of my managers had their e-mail printed out, responded by pen, and handed the responses to their admins. I’m sure there’s still some of this in the world–but not much. People read e-mail electronically. Books follow the same model–with similar delays.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

Rob: I agree with your concerns. BTW, I’ll leave the poll as it is, but if I had to do it over again, I might insert answers to allow for, say, five percent or even one percent. I guess many Creative Commons writers hope that volume will be big enough to justify even a speck of readers becoming buyers. We’ll see. My guess is that most responses will remain in the 25 percent or less category, as far as their chance of buying a CC book they love.

Of course, that’s among people who say they love a book Many and perhaps most readers won’t. So maybe the “25 percent or less” option is still a good one after all.

Thanks,
David

I would never buy a print version if a free CC ebook were available. The only exception involves technical manuals–I often will read it online and just decide to buy a print copy because of convenience.

I frequently give tips for free CC content, so if I read and enjoyed the book, I would have no problem giving tips (I haven’t found much in the way of CC books I’ve enjoyed–with the exception perhaps of Yokai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks (economics) and Kembrew McLeod’s book Freedom of Expression (copyright). For those two books, neither has tipjars on their websites.

It would feel strange giving a tip to a technical book (most of which are written by several people instead of an individual) although I’d consider doing it if I liked it enough.

Yes, and even public domain books too. Sometimes multiple copies. 🙂

Blue Tyson re CC books: Thanks. Would enjoy reading more about your reasons for buying—and also whether and why others might buy. David

I used to be pretty hardcore but nowadays I not only expect but want to get hit by the primitive DRM available today. Once hanging a keen sucker becomes the norm for poilte company we can all rest easy and allow the stocks to seperate the men from the chew toys. Counting down… one two three… no? okay…

I wouldn’t ever purchase the paperback after reading it as an ebook, but it may inspire me to purchase the next in the series…

Frankly, I would rather just buy the e-book. For the specific case of a CC book, it pretty much depends case-by-case on just how much I like the book, how much I think I’m going to reread it, and how much I want it in the paper portion of my library. Not sure I can put a specific percentage on that. The only specific case I can think of offhand is Doctrow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”, which I picked up as a p-book along with several other of his books, without having read the e-book; I might download the e-book sometime to add to the electronic part of my collection, but its specific presence didn’t drive the p-book sale — rather, Doctrow’s general philosophy and other samples of his writing drove me to nab signed p-copies of his work. (Thinking about it, I have picked up p-book versions of several webcomics; those aren’t specifically CC-licensed, but are freely readable, so there is a parallel. In that case, a p-book adds significant value; it’s much easier to read a long stretch of comics in p- form than e- form.)

I think the problem with a CC license as a business model is that a typical CC license says “I am not interested in making a profit from this work.” (Or possibly, “I am not interested in trying to make a profit, but if you see how to make one, I want a piece of it…”) If you want to _sell e-books_, a better approach is something like Webscription; sell commercially until you feel you’ve extracted a reasonable profit, then release as a ‘Free Library’ book to use as a teaser for your other work.

I should be clear: I’m not saying a CC license is in any way wrong, just that it’s not an ideal tool for a business model. If your goal is simply to disseminate your work and name, a CC license may be entirely appropriate. And for some sorts of media, such as photographs, I think it might be an effective sales tool — essentially, the amount of work to create a single photograph is significantly lower than the amount of work to create, say, a novel (so it’s not a problem if you don’t get a high return on any given photo); and you can distribute photographs in one form under CC (e.g., a low-res version) and another form for commercial use (high-res), which makes it easier to leverage the CC version as advertising while still stimulating mashup/sharing uses and conserving the ability to make a profit.

Circling back to the initial point, buying an e-book: if the author distributed their CC work next to a ‘shaker can’ (a PayPal contribution button, for instance), I might contribute if I liked the work. If they sold it in a webstore setup, then I would be more likely to buy; that’s a very clear indication that the author would rather you paid for the work, even if sharing is allowed.

Just a few not-particularly-coherent thoughts…

–John N.

My thoughts are with John’s. I’d happily pay for an eBook I loved. But I don’t want more paper. I have more than I know what to do with!

If I liked the book, wasn’t “wowed” by it but liked it enough to read the next one? Then, like EBA, I’d just be paying for the next one (and hoping it would be available as an eBook, too).

So my answer – for your poll – would have to be “none of the above.”