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Originally Posted by Happ
Derek, you cannot take your behavior as a model. Most people will not buy if they can not buy it and still have it no matter what.
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I direct you to the bottled water industry. People will indeed pay money--lots of it--for what's available to them for free. They will pay for convenience, for packaging, for a brand name they trust, and ignore the quality of the content.
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I would favor a law that would allow one to publish an electronic title a given publisher refuses to publish digitally.
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Don't need a law, exactly, just a judge's ruling on a copyright case that refusal to enter a market makes it available for others to copy into. Such a ruling would also imply that books never released in paperback were free to be published in that way. Potentially, to avoid commercial exploitation, the ruling could say that no direct profit could be made from the unauthorized copies.
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As to Baen, it is funny as this always comes to the fore in these discussions. I would like that model to prosper. However, that is not what I see. If it did prosper, they would expand and others would do the same. As far as I know, it is not prospering at all and it might not even be around next year.
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Why would they expand faster than they are? They publish genre books. They publish as many as they can handle, as fast as they can get them edited & into production. They're making money at their ebooks, and more from their paper books.
Other companies don't copy them because they just don't believe it works, despite 10 years of active profits. Or they think it won't work for them. Or they think they can make more with DRM'd ebooks in one or two formats only.
Part of Baen's success is their very casual attitude towards unauthorized additional copies, and that's just too hard for many publishers to accept. Baen takes the position that anyone *reading* their books is, at worst, a future customer, and doesn't worry about how they got access to the books. So far--10 years--it's working.
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BTW, tell me, why would anyone pay for Atlantis if they can have the same for free with Open Office?
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They prefer Atlantis' settings options. Or they prefer the HTML output options. Or they like the look of the UI. Or they like the smaller program size. Or something else. There are dozens of ways that two programs that offer the same basic features can differ, and a strong preference for any one feature can make the program worth $35.
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But, alas, if you give it for free, you will go bust sooner or later. Or else, you get some Big Corporation behind you, like Google is behind Firefox.
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There are plenty of ways to stay in business while giving away free products.
Sell tech support. Sell skins & other enhancements. Offer subscriptions to early updates. Have premium features that cost on top of basic free features. Sell (blech) ads attached to the product. Get a government grant. (I believe that's how Twitter got started.) Take donations. Allow free use for personal purposes, but charge for use for business purposes.
Payment doesn't have to come directly from each person who finds value in the product, in order for it to be supported enough for a company to stay in business.