Today we're talking about giving it all away. That's right, You get a bestseller! You get a bestseller! Everyone gets a bestseller! I get a lawsuit for blatantly stealing Oprah's schtick. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Kindle's ebook bestseller list. Presently, more than half of bestsellers on Amazon's Kindle list cost exactly $0. While some of these are public domain content, several of the titles are actually authored by writers who are trying to earn a living through their craft. The New York Times posted an article recently describing the marketing reasoning behind the free books, which you can read here.
What I'd like to talk about isn't why they would be giving these books away, as I think the writer of that article did a fine job covering those points. What I'd like to talk about is how the internet, and eBooks changes the way we sample new media. In earlier days if you wanted to try a new author's work, it was necessary to either purchase one of their books (as reading in a store was and is still frowned upon) or borrow a copy, assuming one was available, from the local library. This system worked, but certainly kept new readers from branching out too much with new authors or trying newer publications. I generally don't want to spend my money and my time on a book from an author I've never heard of, and usually the library's selection is limited and the books are not always in the best condition. Often I find myself unwilling to check out a book if it looks well worn, attracted instead to the shinier new titles. As such, despite being an avid reader, I find that I spend very little time checking out up and coming authors or newly started series. Instead I spend my money and my time on established writers who I know will provide me with a certain level of quality.
Enter the Kindle. Presently, my iPhone kindle app is filled with a number of books that I would probably never think to purchase in a normal bookstore. I've downloaded these books simply because they were free, instantly available, and in a genre I enjoy. This is only possible because the internet allows instantaneous transmission of a document that takes up no physical space and takes a fraction of the cost of a normal book to make. I can thumb through the entirety of the text, and discard it if I don't like it, or save it if I think it's worth reading. The advent of this technology has actually made it possible to sample an entire product instead of just a small teaser of it.
This isn't restricted to just books either. Websites like youtube and hulu have made available whole movies and episodes of television series at no charge beyond your monthly internet connection fee, and if you happen to be in a wifi hotspot, you don't even pay that. Like Ms. Rich said in the Times article, the thinking of these campaigns is to drive sales of other content by allowing the consumer to get a free trial, but while the free trial is nothing new, providing complete content as a "trial" is something entirely unheard of.
An exciting idea would be if the next step of this process would involve allowing users to download any book they want for only the cost of a single subscription fee.
1 comment:
The issue there would be how much that subscription fee would be and how the money would be divided among all of the deserving parties. Who would really profit from this? The person who comes up with the netflix for books or the author and publisher?
I'm sure it will eventually go this way, but I'm curious how this will effect the publishing industry.
Post a Comment