TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Free Your Mind

Steven also pointed out, somewhat counter to his argument, that written works are fundamentally dissimilar to music — at least for now — and that is in the sense that when you download music, it isn’t really any different than ripping the music from a disc. It sounds more or less the same. Books, however, are not; reading a book on a computer is simply not as enjoyable as reading it in, well, book form. Thus, giving it away for free in a less desirable, computer-bound form could be a marketing strategy to sell more of the hard-copy books.

Even so, for someone who depends upon writing for a living, that’s dangerously thin ice to be on. I love how 37Signals gives away their book for free in PDF form, but it’s important to remember that isn’t their key business — they ca afford to give it away for free and cherish the people who buy the hardcopy.

One commenter suggests that, perhaps, after a few years a writer should give away their work for free, after sales have dropped to a low enough level. It wouldn’t hurt them financially, because they were already not earning much from book sales, but it would be good free press and free goodwill. And that can only help them. People that never would have heard of said writer, or taken the time to read his material, would now be reading it, and possibly even buy his latest work because they enjoyed his old stuff so much. That sounds like a viable strategy to me.

At the end of last year, I decided to give away my book, Trigger Happy, in DRM-free .pdf format. I called it “a kind of experiment”. Thirty thousand downloads later and counting, it’s time to collate the lab results.