Paulo Coelho, well known author of The Alchemist, has taken a novel (ha ha) approach to the “Scarcity vs Scale” discussion. He’s created The Pirate Coelho, a jumping off point to a Box.net storage account with PDF’s of some of his books.
There’s a description of what and why on TorrentFreak and a video of Coelho talking about how the web has challenged traditional publishig.
The figures are hard to argue with:
“…how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more…”
Interesting stuff. He looks good with a pirate eye patch, too 
3 responses so far ↓
ebookguru // January 29, 2008 at 6:14 pm |
The idea of increasing sales by giving books away makes sense actually – the more people who enjoy the work, the more people you have recommending it.
Mike // January 30, 2008 at 11:21 pm |
It’s true. But at the same time, understandably hard for publishers with fairly traditional money-making models to come to terms with…
(Selling) content in a networked age « electronic museum // April 1, 2009 at 4:41 pm |
[...] and locked down) is a source of fairly passionate debate. I’ve written extensively about Paulo Coehlo’s experiments in freeing his books, about API’s, about “copywrong“, about value, authority and [...]