Giving it Away
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 by Patrick RossIn my last post, I discussed this notion that anything online should be free. Radiohead received much praise for releasing In Rainbows for a limited time online free while asking for voluntary payments (although there has been some dispute over how much they earned and they've said they won't do that publicity stunt with their next album).
An author, Steven Poole, decided to release his book Trigger Happy free online, asking for voluntary payments. He says he had far more downloads than he did sales of physical books, and reached a global audience, which can't hurt with future books. And how did he do in terms of online payments?
I put a PayPal button below the download. Is this, as some people say, an exciting new internet-age business model for writers and other creative types? Er, not really. The proportion of people who left a tip after downloading Trigger Happy was 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%. I am of course very grateful to each of them, though I was particularly amused by several who left $0.01, which seems a lot of clicks to expend when you could just write "F*&k you" in the comments. (Censorship mine.)
I guess the folks going out of their way to give a penny could tell themselves that they had paid for the work. And now Mr. Poole had something to leave in the "leave-a-penny, take-a-penny" tray at the local convenience store.
The most important thing about Mr. Poole's post, as well as that of author David Pogue, who made me aware of this in the New York Times, is that they put the lie to the business-model arguments made about the music industry. We constantly hear that P2P has made the sound recording of no economic value (a position I vehemently disagree with, based on simple economics of production cost, including talent). The argument is that musicians should make their money touring, ignoring the songwriters and music publishers and questioning why musicians would ever again spend time in the studio creating new works.
This model is seriously flawed, but it cannot in any way be grafted on to any other copyright industry. As we hear from Mr. Poole and Mr. Pogue, there is no way for an author to earn a living through speaking tours. I have made this argument many times, and have added you can't produce a movie or software without an expectation of payment for the final product. I don't care if the marginal cost of copying and transporting a digital work is near zero, the fixed cost is not.
It's important for artists of all backgrounds to speak up for their rights, and not let goofy myths about giveaways of creative works go unchallenged.
