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Magic Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most restrictive Creative Commons license available. All it allowed my readers to do was send around copies of the book. I was cautiously dipping my toe into the water, though at the time, it felt like I was taking a plunge. 
 
Now I\'m going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons \"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial\" license [HUMAN READABLE LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my blessing to create derivative works from my first book. You can make movies, audiobooks, translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction (God help us) [GEEK HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry, translations, t-shirts, you name it, with two provisos: that one, you have to allow everyone else to rip, mix and burn your creations in the same way you\'re hacking mine; and on the other hand, you\'ve got to do it noncommercially. 
 
The sky didn\'t fall when I dipped my toe in. Let\'s see what happens when I get in up to my knees. 
 
The text with the new license will be online before the end of the day. Check craphound.com/down for details. 
 
Oh, and I\'m also releasing the text of this speech under a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain dedication] giving it away to the world to do with as it see fits. It\'ll be linked off my blog, Boing Boing, before the day is through.

$$$$

Free(konomic) E-books

(Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007)

Can giving away free electronic books really sell printed books? I think so. As I explained in my March column (\"You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen\"), I don\'t believe that most readers want to read long-form works off a screen, and I don\'t believe that they will ever want to read long-form works off a screen. As I say in the column, the problem with reading off a screen isn\'t resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it\'s that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.

Sure, some readers have the cognitive quirk necessary to read full-length works off screens, or are motivated to do so by other circumstances (such as being so broke that they could never hope to buy the printed work). The rational question isn\'t, \"Will giving away free e-books cost me sales?\" but rather, \"Will giving away free e-books win me more sales than it costs me?\"

This is a very hard proposition to evaluate in a quantitative way. Books aren\'t lattes or cable-knit sweaters: each book sells (or doesn\'t) due to factors that are unique to that title. It\'s hard to imagine an empirical, controlled study in which two \"equivalent\" books are published, and one is also available as a free download, the other not, and the difference calculated as a means of \"proving\" whether e-books hurt or help sales in the long run.

I\'ve released all of my novels as free downloads simultaneous with their print publication. If I had a time machine, I could re-release them without the free downloads and compare the royalty statements. Lacking such a device, I\'m forced to draw conclusions from qualitative, anecdotal evidence, and I\'ve collected plenty of that:

  * Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who\'s tried this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a high degree of satisfaction with the outcomes
  
  * A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time as mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one another by critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download, his didn\'t. We compared sales figures and I was doing substantially better than him -- he subsequently convinced his publisher to let him follow suit
  
  * Baen Books has a
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