“Free Culture,” free book
Stanford law professor and Internet guru Lawrence Lessig has written a new book, Free Culture, in which he decries how companies like Disney have co-opted America’s copyright laws and transformed them into just the opposite of the limited protection our Founding Fathers intended them to be. Fittingly, the book is subtitled “How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.” But Lessig’s biggest statement may not be any passage in the book, but rather that he has put his money where his mouth is. He is giving away digital copies of the new book on his Web site for free.
“This is an experiment,” Lessig has said, “but it is my view that exercising less control over at least some content is a better way to drive demand.” He’s probably right.
Recently a friend recommended I read G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, which was published in 1908. Not wanting to wait until I found myself a paper copy, I downloaded a free digital copy from Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is a movement of volunteers around the world who painstakingly scan and proofread books that have fallen into the public domain. The result is an online library of thousands of classics from Austen to Yeats that is available to anyone with Internet access.
I read the first chapter of Orthodoxy on my computer screen, and I learned two things. First, that I wanted to read the rest of the book; second, that there’s no way I was going to do it off a laptop’s screen. So, I went and got myself a dead-tree version.
The lesson is that there isn’t yet a technology that can comfortably replace paper for reading an average-length book. Free Culture is offered in Adobe PDF format, which has the advantages of being universal, true to the original, and searchable. That said, no one but the most obsessive computer geeks will read Lessig’s book off their flatscreens or PDAs, so he isn’t going to lose too many sales to digital. What’s more, he will likely increase sales as people who might not otherwise pick up the book will do so after reading a few pages online.
Won’t people just print out the book? Printing it will cost as much, if not more, than buying the book. They’ll print it at the office, you say? First, it’s not easy sneaking off a 400-page print job. Second, you have to be incredibly hard up for cash to stomach flipping through a hefty, amateur-bound 8×10 document. Buying the book is just easier for the type of person who would be interested in reading Lessig’s book in the first place.
On the the Amazon.com page for Free Culture there is one link to buy the book and another to download it for free. Still, the book is selling briskly.
In fact, Amazon has been a pioneer in letting customers sample content before they buy it. It recently unveiled a new service that allows users to search the contents–not just the titles and authors–of over 190,000 books. Just a week after the program was launched, Amazon reported a nine percent increase in the sales of the books that are searchable as compared to those that are not. This is consistent with the results of several surveys that have shown that people who download music from the Internet (even illegally) are more likely to buy albums.
While the idea that freeing content will drive demand is probably doubly true for books, publishers continue to be skeptical. The Author’s Guild launched a campaign against Amazon’s new service after it found that users could download and print up to 20 percent of certain books in consecutive pages, or 108 pages of one best-seller. But again, you would have to be incredibly fixated to go to the trouble of printing out a book this way–and you would still only end up with less than a quarter of only some books and with poor print quality. Moreover, the increase in sales from the new service would surely make up for any sales lost to digital.
Strategically loosening content is a win-win situation for everyone involved. In Lessig’s case he sells more books and draws attention to his Creative Commons licenses that allow copyright holders to safely make their content freely available. The public gets a searchable preview. The market will ultimately bend to the much-maligned maxim that information wants to be free. There is money to be made in giving up on control over content.
Jerry Brito is editor of Brainwash and a student at George Mason University School of Law. His Web site is jerrybrito.com.
10 Comments - add your own
James N. Markels — April 12, 2004 at 12:04 am
If Lessig is only offering part of his book for free, then you are forced to pay in order to read the parts not on his Web site. The only difference between Lessig and other authors is degree, not principle, since even Lessig realizes that he won’t be selling any books if he gives away the contents. Just as CD sales have dropped dramatically with the advent of file-swapping, book sales will drop if their content is similarly available. And there’s nothing wrong with that, so long as the alternative method of obtaining the content ensures that the creator/publisher is getting paid for it. Lessig, to some extent at least, seems to agree.
Jerry Brito — April 12, 2004 at 12:16 am
I thought I was perfectly clear when I wrote, “He is giving away digital copies of the new book on his Web site for free.” (And also provided a link.) To be even more clear: Lessig is giving away his entire book, cover to cover, for free, to anyone, in PDF, at his Web site. And he’s not the first successful author to do this. Cory Doctorow gave away his “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” in a zillion different formats. See http://www.craphound.com/down/download.php. -JB
James N. Markels — April 12, 2004 at 10:17 am
Woah, that’s weird. When I read this last, I thought I specifically saw you state that Lessig was only giving away the first few chapters. My mistake. But anyway, why should we not expect the long-term trend of buying books to go the same way as CDs? People used to argue that file-sharing music online wouldn’t result in lower CD sales, but we now know that’s false.
Farmer Bob — April 12, 2004 at 11:04 am
Why are declining CD sales bad? We are simply returning to a time when artists couldn’t bottle up their music (records, cassettes, CDs). Now they’ll have to earn their money how artists used to earn their money, by playing music for an audience.
James N. Markels — April 12, 2004 at 1:41 pm
Declining CD sales aren’t bad so long as the consumer is paying for the content in whatever medium they obtain it in.
PJ Doland — April 12, 2004 at 5:45 pm
You could make a pretty good argument that the press Doctorow and Lessig have received by being the first to do this has been a major factor in their success.
Farmer Bob — April 13, 2004 at 1:12 pm
Then the first musicians to do this also would be sucessful.
Ike Hall — April 15, 2004 at 9:49 am
The Mises Institute has been publishing full economics texts for many years. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the publishing industry, the availability of these texts has not decreased their sales. In fact, having the entire text available will simply whet people’s appetites for the analog version, as it were, and for all of the reasons that Mr. Brito noted above.
Kevin Michael Grace — April 19, 2004 at 2:19 am
“Farmer Bob” declares we are “simply returning to a time when artists couldn’t bottle up their music.” Ah yes, the good old days when Stephen Foster died destitute, despite being the most popular songwriter in America.
Jerry Brito — April 22, 2004 at 4:00 pm
Dan Gillmor, technology columnist at The San Jose Mercury News, is writing a book on the future of journalism in a networked age. Some critics deny blogs can be realiable sources of information because they are unedited, but Gillmor points out that the community of readers become the editors. We all know how an unfairly partisan or factually mistaken blog post will be assailed in comments to the post or in competing blogs.
Like Lawrence Lessig, Gillmor is putting his money where his mouth is and is posting the chapter drafts of his book on his website. He is encouraging people to read them and offer criticism so he can make the finished product better. Not only will Gillmor reap the benefits of loosening the grip on content that I’ve discussed previously, but he’ll also get access to free fact-checking and research. We also don’t just get a free book, but a better book in the end. The book should be in stores by July. See: http://www.jerrybrito.com/blog/000403.shtml