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cory doctorow
the future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I’ll share
them with you:
1. Ebooks aren’t marketing. [Ebooks aren’t marketing] OK, so
ebooks
are
marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new
volume sells the hell out of the new book — and the backlist. And
the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much
they dug the ebook and so bought the paper book far exceeds
the number of people who wrote to me and said, “Ha, ha, you
hippie, I read your book for free and now I’m not gonna buy it.”
But ebooks
shouldn’t
be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal
unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more
words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when
those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that
writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-
tree editions.
2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
books] Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write
to me to say that it’s easier to do their term papers if they can
copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build
concordances of characters, places, and events.
3. Unless you own the ebook, you don’t 0wn the book [Unless
you own the ebook, you don’t 0wn the book]. I take the view that
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