Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
I bought a book recently on the basis of reading a short story that was being given away on the basis of being a "web exclusive" featuring characters from the book. I liked that, so I bought the book. The "short story" turned out to be a chapter from the book with a few extra paragraphs at the beginning, and a paragraph relating to incidents that took place earlier in the book removed.
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Sure, that's largely analogous to giving away one song off an album. There's lots that can be done in terms of those kind of samples.
Giving away a whole book doesn't work though since most books only get read once by most people.
To be fair, most people that get a whole album on MP3 aren't going to by the CD of that album either.
Though bands do have the option of putting albums streaming on their website, myspace page etc., to spur sales, where as a publishers wouldn't want to put a whole book readable online.
If I read the book online, I'm not buying it. If I like an album I stream, I will buy it as I want the CD to listen to in the car, to rip to MP3s to listen to elsewhere, better sound quality etc.
So again, the point that books really have zero "replay" value for most of the people most of the time seems an added challenge in terms of give aways and promotions compared to music which has infinite replay value.