When I was a child ebooks were all the rage; nook and kindle were running large ad campaigns, while iBooks and google books were fighting for market share. As an avid reader with a willful ignorance of copyright law I began compiling and publishing publicly available books onto these platforms for free.
While the actual data is lost to time, I believe I published 10-15 technical books (all related to programming or similar topics), with a few hundred or a couple thousand distributed copies overall. This was enough to have a couple reviews for each book, giving me a sample size I could extrapolate over, well beyond its statistical significance.
As these publishers demanded profit, they clamped down on free content and forced paid content. They also forced me to remove direct links to other sites where the content could be retrieved for free. Refusing to give up on my success distributing other people's content, I began charging the minimum fee for each book (usually 0.99-2.99), and donating it to the source provider. I unknowingly embarked on an experiment in low-cost media distribution, teaching me three valuable lessons.
- Consumers are happier with cheap things than free things. There could have been a lot of factors at play, however reviews on marketplace where the book was free were critical of the quality of the book, while reviews in marketplaces where the book had to cost money were much more positive. In one instance I had uploaded a partially complete book by mistake, and it had multiple five star reviews on a paid marketplace. I only learned it was incomplete later when people on the free google ebook marketplace complained, eventually taking the book down.
- Consumers who complain about price often do so because they have no money. This is something that comes up in app development too, where if someone gets really mad about media costing $1.99, it may be because they are a child with no money. I find this particularly applicable to other aspects of life, and I think it is worthwhile to apply to other products. Children have to find unique ways to interact online; I myself paid for server access with BTC until I was old enough to get a credit card. I believe it can be beneficial to give young people access to your products so they can help build the ecosystem, even if they are incapable of paying for anything at the time. Although I have limited data to back this claim, I suspect kids with no money and infinite time make up a surprising amount of the internet.
- Nobody reads the description. Honestly I do this too but there’s a humor in buying a 100 page book but not bothering to read a 2 paragraph description of what you’re getting. Again the most critical reviews were on the free content, despite the paid content being similarly popular.
For me, this saga started in late middle school and ended in high school, when the legal and moral complications of what I was doing started to catch up with me. I don’t regret it per say, as I was still able to get hundreds of free technical books out to people who otherwise may have never been able to read about popular programming languages or technical topics.
It also led me to my most starred repo; after all the distribution nonsense passed and I started a github I created a sample epub ebook file, which has since been updated to v3, although better options now exist.