Freebies, get your freebies!
Monday, February 11, 2008 6:56
Harper Collins has decided that it may be good publishing business to offer some books free online. Read the whole story before you decide, but it could make some business sense. Why not offer part of a book, or even a whole book, online for people to preview so they can start lusting after it and then go buy it?
I know there are some music sites that do this, give you a 30-second or a minute listen to a song and then, if you like it, you can buy it or even the whole album. The idea of prelistening or previewing a book online could help boost internet sales too. Why not read the book, then order it from Amazon if you like the first few chapters?
The bottom of the article mentions the next book by Victoria Alexander, The Perfect Wife, will have the first fifth put online for people to read. All the books Harper Collins is putting online seem to appeal to a cross section of the reading populace, giving access to a little bit of everything. I’m definitely all for encouraging reading and doing what you can to get people to buy books.
Let’s see how it actually works though. 
[Edit from Gwen: How is this any different than online excerpts, I wonder, except perhaps a little bit longer excerpt (which I LOVE LOVE LOVE)? This sounds like a marketing approach to me, to make it sound like they're doing something nifty neat and wonderful, when it's actually relatively normal. Come to think of it, I've written marketing campaigns like that...]
katiebabs says:
February 11th, 2008 at 9:21 am
FREE??!? My favorite word! If it’s free, it’s for me
Katie says:
February 11th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Gad, all i can think of is that you read the NYT and I try to avoid newspapers like hell because of their depressing news. Humpf.
Pam P says:
February 11th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Sounds like they want to entice you with enough of the story, hoping you’ll want to continue on and right after you finish that longer excerpt, go dowload the ebook.
CindyS says:
February 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am
It would be helpful also in finding duds. How many books have I picked up thinking the idea sounds great but then got burned. Course, I would have to go and find the site and well, lazy.
Cindys
Lawson says:
February 11th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I think with some of them it’s the entire book and others it’s just a longer excerpt sort of thing. Gwen’s right though, it’s just a marketing technique, plain and simple.
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Aart says:
February 17th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
well – what people don’t know is that Harper Collins only launched this free online reading site after the bestselling author Paulo Coelho revealed his pirate coelho blog to the world during the DLD conference in Munich last January.
I read the interveiw he gave for Newsweek and can’t help to join the dots:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/108715
I doubt Harper Collins would have made such a move without this author’s pressure.
Thumbs up for Pirate Coelho!