4th
BookExpo report on Free book experiments
From Publishers Marketplace: “First up with some hard numbers on the pros and cons of free was Peter Balis, Director of Digital Content Sales at Wiley. For the first time, the company found its e-book sales have migrated from academic research to consumer reading. He offered up Frommers.com as an example of making the entire contents of particular travel books available for free, but instead of being organized by chapter, they are organized by theme or specific topic — “thus it doesn’t actually replace the printed book.” And because both print and ebook edition maintain the top market share, “you don’t have to rob Peter to pay Paul.”
With Cliffs Notes, it was a different story. Cliffsnotes.com sells $5.99 print editions of their Litnotes guides, while the website allows students - especially those surfing late at night - to read the complete digital offering for free (the site is supported by ads, most currently Apple offering iPod Touch giveaways and the ROTC.) The tradeoff is twofold: there’s no portability (a live internet connection is needed) but the downloadable version has a 25% conversion rate from free to paid because “students want and need them anytime”, not to mention that the LitNotes can’t be printed unless they are paid for. The Cliff Notes Success test prep guides have no free component at all and are bought as a subscription, but double-digit sales growth means the test prep guides “have more than paid for itself and earn out against free ebooks online.”
Balis then offered two case studies on how free ebooks work or don’t. The first case, where THE TRUTH ABOUT CHEATING was made available for free for a 24-hour period bracketing the author’s appearance on Oprah, caused the digital download and the print edition to jump to the top of various sales rankings. “We did not cannibalize book sales or create detrimental book effect.” But the second example, enabling WORLD WIDE WAVE for free download for a seven-day-period was less successful despite “significant” downloads in the high four-figure range. Failure here, Balis said, was “more that a 1 week period is too long - there’s no cachet in generating interest and buzz at being first people to download. On day 3, there’s no big rush because there’s still four more days to do so.”
Ultimately Balis cited three rules learned from Wiley’s free ebook download experiments:
“Free does not cannibalize paid.
Free does not dilute brand or content.
Free has some purpose, either as advertising, PR or marketing or something further downstream, to upsize/monetize product or generate revenue.”
