Recently, Tobias Buckell said on Bloggasm that releasing his novel Crystal Rain as a free download through Tor resulted in a small but significant spike in sales of hard copies, even though it has now been available in mass-market paperback for more than a year and sales would be expected to be moving steadily towards heat death. Back in February, John Scalzi reported an even more impressive boost in sales of his books after they were released free online. And while Neil Gaiman is waiting for more sales data to roll in, he is very upbeat about his own experience. “Given that Harper Collins sold a lot more of all my books while the free American Gods was out there, with sales of all my titles up 40% through independent bookshops, I think I can safely say that we’ll be doing it — or rather, something similar — again.”

Tor and Baen are very different publishers and have come up with very different business models. Baen tends to focus on developing a dedicated fan base for its stable of authors; and it tends to publish books that fit squarely within genre expectations; that is, the reader who buys a Baen book knows exactly what sort of story is coming. (This is not a criticism, I hasten to add.) In 2000, Baen launched the Baen Free Library which, as its “First Librarian” Eric Flint said, “Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender.” The Baen Free Library will publish free online any Baen book so long as the author requests it; Eric Flint started the ball rolling with one of his own novels and the site now boasts dozens of free novels online.

Tor is a more general publisher than Baen — although it still maintains a large science fiction and fantasy house, Tor offers a much greater range of work and a greater variety of styles and even some genre-bending. Tor’s free books are being offered as a way of enlisting a large number of subscribers to their ezine and newsletters. That is, Tor is offering the books for free as a way of building their marketing base. If the books sell well that’s a bonus but it’s not the purpose of the exercise (at least, not at this stage).

On the other hand, most publishers aren’t going near it. They see ebooks in much the same light as the music industry’s view of free mp3 downloads. Bestselling author Robert Sawyer is skeptical of the tactic of giving away what you’re trying to sell. “I understand that people want it to be true that giving away ebooks significantly boosts print sales. I’m just not convinced that a case has been clearly made that it is in fact generally true, and I won’t be convinced until there are a lot more hard numbers.”

I have my own take on this. Before I get to it, I’d just like to point out that most of the authors and publishers involved in this debate have been open about the uncertainties and the difficulty in deriving useful data given the complexities of book retailing. This respect for uncertainty has not been reflected in the often dogmatic comments that are attached to the authors’ various blogs. So I’d just like to add my caveat here that I am talking about an unsupported opinion and am awaiting further evidence before making up my mind.

My feeling is that giving away free ebooks is, in the long run, only going to work for a small number of authors. Right now, giving away books online is an exciting novelty. As it becomes older and more common it will lose its glamour and will settle down to being just another marketing strategy. Partly it will depend on how successful ebook reading machines become. As long as e-readers are still cumbersome and much less pleasant to read than printed books, there will always be a premium for hard copies of books. If e-readers become as enjoyable to read as paperbacks, then more people will gladly change over their reading entirely to ebooks. I don’t for a moment believe that printed books will ever disappear or even become a trivial sector of the market. But I do think the excitement about free ebooks has been most beneficial to those authors whose readers are highly tech-savvy and who understand the process very well: that is, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and Charles Stross. I do wonder if the same benefits will accrue to writers who don’t have a big online presence or who aren’t already best-sellers. Having said that, I still think the experiment is well worth proceeding with. For many midlist authors, keeping their books online is the only thing saving them from being completely unsellable. And while it’s a long shot that an established midlist author will suddenly generate a lot of interest in past books, it does happen (sometimes even a single book will leap from the backlist to the front window), and is certainly more likely if the book is available in some form as opposed to out of print and unobtainable.

The future is also clouded by the growing sophistication of on-demand publishing. It is not unlikely that within ten years, bookshops will increasingly stock only bestsellers, collectable or art books, and promotional books and for all the other basic midlist books, there will be a printing machine out the back that will print and bind a paperback copy of any book on the bookshop’s database — and indeed, self-publishing may become as easy as emailing your book to the local bookshop to get printed, just as photographic printing has become as easy as emailing your photos to the local lab. How this will affect the publishing industry is a large topic in itself, but it will certainly have some bearing on the benefits of free ebooks.

As always, we await more information…