Quote:
Originally Posted by PKFFW
Possibly, though if the vast majority can't bring themselves to throw a single buck or even less the authors way without having to first read the entire book to see "what value they place on it", I wouldn't hold my breath that any significant proportion of these people would go back to the website and pay anything at a later date. Some will of course, the vast majority most likely will not regardless of how much they enjoyed it.
Maybe I'm just too cynical though.
Cheers,
PKFFW
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A few years ago, a British shareware author called Colin Messitt conducted an experiment to see how many people would
voluntarily pay for something, rather than being coerced into doing so.
Colin released a shareware program called "SmartDoc". With a 50/50 probability (depending on whether your hard disk's serial number was odd or even - something like that, so it always behaved the same way on a given PC) the program was either fully functional, but with a "nag screen" which requested payment when it started up, or else it was restricted in its functionality, and required payment to become fully functional. A code number, which the user had to supply when registering, told Colin which of the two "behaviours" of the program any given user had encountered.
The results were quite emphatic. Colin received 5x as many registrations from the version which required payment for full functionality than he did from the version which was fully functional, and merely requested payment.
You can read the whole story
here.
Obviously this is talking about shareware software, and not e-Books, but I think the same principle still applies, and that it demonstrates that providing people with a positive incentive to pay works a lot better than merely requesting a payment.