In an effort to widen its marketing reach on the Internet significantly, HarperCollins Publishers will let readers see excerpts of its authors’ books on its own Web site as well as those of the authors themselves.
Today the company will introduce a program called “Browse Inside” on its Web site, providing readers access to the first three pages of most chapters in 135 titles by 10 authors, including well-known writers like Michael Crichton, Lisa Scottoline, Bernard Cornwell and Paulo Coelho.
HarperCollins has been one of the most aggressive publishing houses in moving into digital publishing. Last year it announced that it would be digitizing all its books. So far it says it has digitized 10,000 of its existing titles, with continuing plans to digitize the remaining 15,000 books on its so-called backlist. All of its forthcoming books will be available digitally as well.
Like Amazon.com’s “Search Inside!” or Google’s Book Search program, HarperCollins’s initiative allows readers to replicate in cyberspace the experience of going to a bookstore and flipping through a few pages before buying a book....
Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian-born author of “The Alchemist” and other books, said he believed Web excerpts helped drive sales. “It is a very intelligent way to market a book,” he said by telephone from St. Martin, France. Mr. Coelho said that he has even linked to whole pirated editions of his books in Russian, and that the move spurred sales. “I don’t think that people reading the book on the screen of a computer is going to keep them away from buying these books,” he said.
Comments
I don't normally cover stories about free online samples. But a publisher who knows that free online samples trigger a net increase in sales is poised to discover that free online full-text does the same, at least for novels and monographs. (This won't work, or won't work as well, for books that readers want only for snippets like dictionaries, encyclopedias, and cookbooks.) Paolo Coehlo's experience points in the right direction and the HarperCollins analysts, who are presumably crunching traffic and sales data, should pay attention to it.
Because the NYTimes removes new stories from the free portion of its web site after a few days, note the CNet version of the same story.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/04/2006 10:38:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
