Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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Tim O'Reilly presents a case study of downloads versus sales of the book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, by Leif Madsen, Jared Smith, and Jim Van Meggelen, which was released for free download under a Creative Commons license. Read about it in his blog O'Reilly Radar (6/1/07).
"The quick answer from this experiment is that we saw no definitive correlation, but there is little sign that the free downloads hurt sales. More than 180,000 copies were downloaded from Jeremy's mirror (which is one of five!), yet the book has still been quite successful, selling almost 19,000 copies in a year and a half. This is quite good for a technical book these days -- the book comes in at #23 on our lifetime-to-date sales list for the "class of 2005" (books published in 2005) despite being released at the end of September. You might argue that the book would have done even better without the downloads, especially given the success of asterisk and the importance of VoIP. But it's also the case that the book is far and away the bestseller in the category, far outperforming books on the same subject from other publishers.
Meanwhile, we saw a huge spike in downloads starting at the beginning of this year, but didn't see a corresponding drop in print book sales, other than the continued slow erosion that's typical of books in print (especially one that's heading towards a second edition.) However, we did see the book's first fall from grace, dropping from an average run rate of about a thousand copies a month to about six hundred back in March 2006 coming at about the same time that we start showing the free downloads, but we're not sure whether or not that is just because we don't have earlier download data -- we believe that the book was available online sooner after publication even though Jeremy didn't start his mirror till March. (Next time we do a book available for free download, we'll be careful to collect accurate data from the start of the project.) "
There's much more information in O'Reilly's post.
Posted by P. Kaufman at June 3, 2007 1:28 PM
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