Does giving away best-selling e-books make business sense?

Publishers including Harlequin, Random House and Scholastic are offering free versions of digital books to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-retailers, as a way of letting readers try out the work of unfamiliar writers. The hope is customers who like what they read will go on to obtain another title for money. Not everyone thinks this is smart.

…Answer: Give copies away.That’s right. More than half of the best-selling e-books on the Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-reader, are available at no charge.Although some of the titles are digital versions of books in the public domain like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice many are by authors still trying to make a living from their work.Earlier this week, for example, the No. 1 and 2 spots on Kindle’s best-seller list were taken by Cape Refuge and Southern Storm, both novels by Terri Blackstock, a writer of Christian thrillers. The Kindle price: $0. Until the end of the month, Ms. Blackstock’s publisher, Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, is offering readers the opportunity to download the books free to the Kindle or to the Kindle apps on their iPhone or in Windows. Publishers including Harlequin, Random House and Scholastic are offering free versions of digital books to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-retailers, as well as on author Web sites, as a way of allowing readers to try out the work of…

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Does giving away best-selling e-books make business sense?

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  2. The Cost of Production: E-Books vs Printed Books
  3. Publishers seek more control of e-book prices from Amazon
  4. Amazon threatens more publishers with freeze-out over prices
  5. Amazon to Macmillan: You Win (for Now)

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 12:29 am and is filed under News. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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