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pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes in long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of data to use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect Volume N+1 to sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a measurable uptick in sales following from free e-book releases of previous and current volumes
  
  * David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, \"piracy\" results in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in sales for the \"middle class\" of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag on the \"super-rich\" in the 97th percentile and higher. Publisher Tim O\'Reilly describes this as \"piracy\'s progressive taxation,\" apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few
  
  * Speaking of Tim O\'Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O\'Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book -- and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O\'Reilly\'s conclusion: downloads didn\'t cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched
  
  * In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my books. The print runs for each edition are modest -- I\'m a midlist writer in a world with a shrinking midlist -- but publishers print what they think they can sell, and they\'re outselling their expectations
  
  * The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as to be uncountable -- foreign rights deals, comic book licenses, speaking engagements, article commissions -- I\'ve made more money in these secondary markets than I have in royalties
  
  * More anecdotes: I\'ve had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, \"I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it.\" By contrast, I\'ve had all of five e-mails from people saying, \"Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don\'t have to buy the print edition, ha ha!\" 

Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don\'t have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.

More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position -- just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices).

I started giving away e-books after I witnessed the early days of the \"bookwarez\" scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their favorite books, scanned them, ran them through optical character recognition software, and manually proofread them to eliminate the digitization errors. These fans were easily spending 80 hours to rip their favorite books, and they were only ripping their favorite
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