Maybury posted yesterday about Harper Collin’s free book experiment, in which they allowed everyone to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free online. (Not, strictly speaking, a new idea, but still.)
How did it go? Gaiman reports:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%
A pretty impressive result. Wu Ming (authors of Q and the brilliant 54) have been advocates of this sort of thing for a long time now, and it’s interesting to see a major publisher dipping its toes in the pool.
I think books are the medium most likely to succeed with this kind of model – apart from the whole “owning the artifact” thing that applies to all media, I find that reading from a computer is much more tiring than reading from a book. Certainly, I never got past the first five pages of 54 until I bought it. (I may be out of the loop on this, feel free to contradict me.) If it becomes common practice it’ll be a step closer to treating people, as Jeff Tweedy put it, as patrons rather than consumers, and that’s something I find utterly delightful.
I’ve been thinking about this subject too recently especially with the advent of Amazon’s Kindle.
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA
They allow free newspapers to be sent to your kindle on a daily basis which is nice but books cost money to download…but then again you can hold up to 500 books on the device.
Kindle has been criticised a fair bit based on the DRM – it only accepts books downloaded from Amazon, and is a bit strict even with them. I’ve heard it’s hackable, though I don’t know links for that off-hand. Even so, I’m not sure it would compare to holding a good ol’ paper book.
Maybury and I have talked about this, I seem to recall him being quite in favour of technology like the Kindle.
It could be a case of being used to books. The act of reading something that you would mentally mark as a “book” in a contrary form could cause subconcious unease. Also you should read about the “Uncanny Valley” if you get a chance extremely interesting stuff.