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cory doctorow
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The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are
so numerous as to be uncountable — foreign rights deals,
comic book licenses, speaking engagements, article com-
missions — I’ve made more money in these secondary mar-
kets than I have in royalties.
>
More anecdotes: I’ve had literally thousands of people ap-
proach me by email and at signings and cons to say, “I found
your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying
it.” By contrast, I’ve had all of five emails from people
saying, “Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don’t
have to buy the print edition, ha ha!”
Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books sub-
stitute for print books. While I don’t have controlled, quantita-
tive data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience
with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that
giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.
More importantly, the free ebook skeptics have no evidence
to offer in support of their position — just hand-waving and dark
muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up
their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to
the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying
their fetish objects
and
carry books around on their electronic de-
vices).
I started giving away ebooks after I witnessed the early days of
the “bookwarez” scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their fa-
vorite books, scanned them, ran them through optical character
recognition software, and manually proofread them to eliminate
the digitization errors. These fans were easily spending 80 hours
to rip their favorite books, and they were
only
ripping their favor-
ite books, books they loved and wanted to share. (The 80-hour
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