Sunday, April 21, 2002
A lesson to the RIAA
(“Sell-through” refers to the percentage of copies shipped which are actually sold, as opposed to being returned to the publisher.)
As of today, according to Baen Books—a year and a half after being available for free online to anyone who wants it, no restrictions and no questions asked—Mother of Demons has sold about 18,500 copies and now has a sell-through of 65%.
I would like someone to explain to me how almost doubling the sales and improving the sell-through by 11% has caused me, as an author, any harm?
Via RobotWisdom, Free the Books!
Good, solid evidance that making a book (or perhaps, by extention, a song perhaps? hint hint) available freely, in electronic format, does not hurt sales and may actually increase sales. It still is easier to read a hard copy-dead tree version of a book in the bathroom (aka “reading room”) and not everyone likes reading for extended periods of time on the computer (me? I'm used to it).
Technically, it's easy. Socialpolitically it's not quite so.
Rob and I had a discussion about the implementation of a mail feature at The Company (where he works). There was a suggestion made for a feature where customers can specify the size limit of email they receive. He felt that adding such a feature would stress the system even more but upon hearing how the email system is set up, felt that adding such a feature is only a few lines of code, if you put it in the right place.
Admid technical discussion (“The program already makes a database call, so
adding one field to the SELECT statement for the maximum size of
the email is easy, and it's a one line call to get the size of the email,
and another line to do the comparrison …” “Yea, but how much overhead
will that add? There are thousands of emails per hour.” “You are already
making a database query so adding one more field isn't that much, and the
two or three lines of code overhead to check the size of the email and
making the comparrison is still small.” “You expect the development
department to get it right … ”) it came out that overall, most
(if not all) customers don't want to specify the size limit of
individual emails.
Rob then went on to describe how one customer tried to send herself a two gigabyte file from work to home because she needed to work on this very important project. Never mind that she was on a 56Kbps dialup and it would take … days! … to download the message, she was livid that The Company would delete her email! How dare they!
And then there was the customer that ended up with a mailbox filled to 80 gigabytes! And how dare The Company for deleting that email! (“Sir, it would be faster for you to come here, hand over a few large harddrives for us to copy your email to,” I joked to Rob. “We don't have 80 gigabytes to store his email on,” said Rob.)
So in the light that most, if not all, customers wouldn't date limit the size of their email, then yes, I can see how it would not be cost effective for The Company to implement said feature. They get enough complaints about email already—they don't need people calling up and bitching that they're not getting their email because The Company is purposely limiting it.
Breaking the sound barrier
Rob noticed Spodie, Spring's cat (and our owner), sleeping in a little (if ever) used bathroom sink.
“Spodie sleeps in the sink?”
“Yes,” I said. “I've seem him do it quite often.”
“What would happen if I turned on the water?”
“Then you would see a cat breaking the sound barrier.”
“So it's best not to be in his way then?”
“Yea.”
