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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Free E-Books And Print Sales, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley
Free E-Books And Print Sales, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley
Faculty Publications
Digital technologies now enable books and other digital resources to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher that put free digital versions of eight of its print books on the Internet. The cost to put these eight books online was $940. Over a 10-week period, these books were downloaded 102,256 times and sales of these books increased 26%. Online sales increased at a much higher rate. Comparisons with historical book sales and sales of comparable titles indicate that that this increase may have been connected to the …
The Short-Term Influence Of Free Digital Versions Of Books On Print Sales, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley
The Short-Term Influence Of Free Digital Versions Of Books On Print Sales, John Hilton Iii, David Wiley
Faculty Publications
Increasingly, authors and publishers are freely distributing their books electronically to increase the visibility of their work. A vital question for those with a commercial stake in selling books is, “What happens to book sales if digital versions are given away?” We used BookScan sales data for four categories of books (a total of 41 books) for which we could identify the date when the free digital versions of the books were made available to determine whether the free version affected print sales. We analyzed the data on book sales for the eight weeks before and after the free versions …