What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [74]
Why shouldn’t books have ads to support them as TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, and web sites do? Ads in books would be less irritating than commercials interrupting shows or banners blinking at you on a web page. Would it be any more corrupting to have ads in this book than next to a story I write in BusinessWeek? You’d have to tell me. If I had a sponsor or two for this book, what would you think of my work as a result? If Dell bought an ad—because, after all, I do say nice things about them now—would you wonder whether I’d sold out to them? I’d fear you’d think that. What about a Google ad? Obviously, that wouldn’t work. Yahoo? Ha! Who might want to talk to you and associate themselves with the thinking in this book while also helping to support it? Would it affect your thinking if the sponsorship lowered the price of the book? From the publisher’s perspective, that could lower risk and increase profits. From mine, it could mean the book costs less and so it sells more and its ideas get wider distribution. (Come to my blog and let’s debate ads in the paperback. Maybe we’ll auction off a few pages on eBay.)
All these models still ignore the internet’s greatest challenge: free. Free is going to kill publishing the way it killed music, right? Maybe not. Maybe free can save publishing.
The Googliest author I know, who also happens to be one of the most monumentally successful authors alive, Paulo Coelho, has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100 million copies of his novels and he estimates that another 20 million have been printed without authorization in countries that flout copyright. Even so, Coelho believes in giving away his books online for free. He’s a pirate.
Coelho learned the value of free in Russia, where a pirated translation of one of his books went online. His sales there jumped from 3,000 to 100,000 to 1 million in less than three years. “So I said this is probably because of the pirate edition,” he told me in a conversation in his Paris apartment. “This happened in English, Norwegian, Japanese, and Serbian. Now when the book is released in hard copy, the sales are spectacular. There’s confirmation that I was right.” He believes this piracy has helped make him the most translated author alive.
The pirated versions helped him so much that Coelho started linking to them from his own web site. After bragging about his openness at the Burda DLD conference in Munich in 2008—where I met him—he got a call from Jane Friedman, who was then head of his publisher, HarperCollins (parent of my publisher). “I was scared to death to talk to her because I knew what was coming: a tempest. She said, ‘I have a problem with you.’” Friedman had caught him in the act of self-piracy when she discovered that one of the supposedly unauthorized pirate versions to which he’d linked still had Coelho’s own notes and corrections in it. “She said, ‘Paulo, come on, don’t shit me.’” He sheepishly confessed to pirating himself. But he also said that neither of them could afford to lose face by taking the editions down; there’d already been publicity about them. They compromised: Each month, one of his books could be read for free, in full, in a special online reader that doesn’t allow a user to copy (or search for or link into) the text. It’s a start.
As this book goes to press, HarperCollins and I have discussed many digital options, including using that reader to put the book online in full for a few weeks before it is published, serializing pieces of the book online for a limited time, putting up free PowerPoint and video versions of the book, and more. I’ll report on what worked on my blog.
In Coelho’s view, the free web has given him more than book sales. He loves writing in a different voice in his blog. “I think your language for your blog is totally different from your language in the Guardian, right?” he said to me as I interviewed