The Man Booker Prize Decides Book Downloads May Not Affect Sales

The Times Online ran a story that the books on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize will be made available as free downloads. What struck me was the quote from Jonathan Taylor, chairman of The Booker Prize Foundation, “The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought. If readers like a novel tasted on the internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book.”

Cory Doctorow has articulated this issue very well. There is an excellent article from him at Forbes about this exact issue. One of the arguments he brings up is this.

“Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.”

So what struck me about the quote was the narrow thinking about sales. And it’s not that I have this crunchy attitude that everything should be free and people shouldn’t make money off their creative work (or the publishers that invest in producing and mass distributing the product to a large audience). But one of the points made in the Doctorow piece is that this is actually good business. His books are published by Tor, which is one of the largest Science Fiction publishers around.

So it’s great that the Man Booker Prize committee has taken this step. I just wish their thinking about sales wasn’t so limited to loss prevention.

(link to Times Online) (link to Forbes article from Cory Dotorow)