Paul Carr writer for Tech Crunch is giving away the PDF of his book Bringing Nothing To The Party ~ True Confessions of a New Media Whore
The logical solution would be to publish the PDF on my site. The print version of the book has been available for 18 months now – it’s had plenty of time on bookstore shelves and with the publication of the paperback in the UK and no US publisher on the horizon, any future sales are just part of the long tail. There’s already a pirated version available on Limewire – that’s where I got the PDF from in the first place – and the more time that passes, the easier it will be to find an unauthorised digital copy.
By releasing the ebook myself for free at this stage of its life, it would do very little damage to sales but will get my words into the hands of a whole new US audience: readers who might then seek out other things I’ve written or pay me to write new things, or buy the properly-formatted Kindle edition with clickable footnotes – or any of the other myriad benefits that Doctorow cites for wanting to give his books away free.
But that’s where W&N’s digital strategy lets me down. The company has the rights to all digital sales of the book outside North America and their parent, Hachette Livre, has decreed that they will not allow any ebooks to be distributed for free, or without DRM. If I make the ebook of Bringing Nothing available for free in the US then there’s nothing to stop foreign readers downloading it, which would breach W&N’s contractual rights. As I explained to my agent, owning the US rights to the ebook is pointless if I can’t do anything with them without pissing off my publisher.
It was that point that he made his brilliant suggestion. The kind of suggestion that makes all those 15%s worthwhile…
“Why don’t you do it anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re allowed to publish it in the US, so why don’t you just do it? If some people in the UK or Australia download it, then so what? It’s not your fault; it’s W&N’s fault for not having a global ebook strategy. And anyway, they should be delighted at the publicity.”
To me this is brilliance and plainly shows an intelligent author frustrated with a stupid publisher so click the book cover above and grab the free PDF eBook guys and fight that piracy while you are doing it.
Tags: Free eBook, Paul Carr
