67 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
67 lines
4.6 KiB
Plaintext
The Web and Identity Goods
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<p>InstaPundit <a href='http://www.instapundit.com/archives/013407.php'>writes</a>:<br />
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<em>This seems to me to suggest that free downloads don’t do much to<br />
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cannibalize actual [book] sales.</em></p>
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<p>I have more (or at least longer-term) experience with this than<br />
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anyone else. Back in 1991, <cite>The New Hacker’s Dictionary</cite><br />
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was the very first real book (like, with an ISBN) to be released<br />
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simultaneously in print and available for free download on-line. Both<br />
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of the books I’ve done since, <cite>The Cathedral and the<br />
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Bazaar</cite> and <cite>The Art of Unix Programming</cite>, have also<br />
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been released for free download at the same time they were in print.<br />
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You can easily find all three on <a href='http://www.catb.org/~esr/'>my<br />
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website</a>.</p>
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<p>Of all my books, only the very first (<cite>Portable C and Unix<br />
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Systems Programming</cite>, 1987) didn’t get webbed. It was a decent<br />
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seller, but the least successful of my books. It’s now out of print, made<br />
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technically obsolete by things that happened in the early 1990s. All<br />
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three of my other books, the ones that got webbed, have remained<br />
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continuously in print.</p>
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<p>My four books do not a controlled experiment make, but the</p>
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<p>thirteen years of experience with simultaneous print and Web<br />
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publication that I’ve had suggests that Web availability has boosted<br />
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the sales of the print versions tremendously. And my publishers<br />
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agree. Even in 1991 I didn’t get resistance from MIT press, and<br />
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Addison-Wesley was positively supportive of putting my most most<br />
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recent one on the Web.</p>
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<p>I’m one of a handful of technical-book writers who publishers treat<br />
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like rock stars, because I have a large fan base and my name on a<br />
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cover will sell a book in volumes that are exceptional for its<br />
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category (for comparison my editor at AW mentions Bruce Eckel as<br />
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another). I’m not certain my experience generalizes to authors who<br />
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<em>aren’t</em> rock stars. On the other hand, it’s more than<br />
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possible that I’m a rock star largely because I <em>have</em> been<br />
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throwing my stuff on the Web since 1991. It’s even likely —<br />
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after all, I was next to an unknown when I edited <cite>The New Hacker’s<br />
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Dictionary</cite>.</p>
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<p>So I don’t find the InstaWife’s experience very surprising.<br />
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Webbing one’s books seems to be really effective way to build a fan<br />
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base. My impression is that people start by browsing the the on-line<br />
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versions of my books, then buy the paper copy partly for convenience<br />
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and partly as what marketers call an identity good.</p>
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<p>An identity good is something people buy to express their tie to a<br />
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group or category they belong to or would like to belong to. People<br />
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buy <cite>The New Hacker’s Dictionary</cite> because they are, or want<br />
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to be, the kind of person they think should own a copy of it.</p>
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<p>Here’s the causal connection: A Web version can’t be an identity<br />
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good, because it doesn’t sit on your bookshelf or your coffee table<br />
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telling everybody (and reminding you!) who you are. But Web exposure<br />
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can, I think, help turn a book with the right kind of potential into<br />
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an identity good. I suspect there is now a population of psychologists<br />
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and social workers who perceive the InstaWife’s book as an identity<br />
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good, and that (as with my stuff) that perception was either created or<br />
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strongly reinforced by web exposure.</p>
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<p>If so, this would explain why webbing her book made the auction<br />
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price for the out-of-print paper version go up. The price of the<br />
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paper version reflects buyers’ desires to be identifiable as members<br />
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of the community of readers of the book. By making softcopy available<br />
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for download, the InstaWife enhanced the power of the paper version as<br />
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an identity token, by making it easy for a larger population to learn<br />
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the meaning of the token.</p>
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<p>I would go so far as to predict that any book (or movie, or CD)<br />
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that functions as an identity good will tend to sell more rather than<br />
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less after Web exposure. All three of my in-print books happen to be<br />
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identity goods rather strongly, for slightly different but overlapping<br />
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populations. I suspect the InstaWife’s book has this quality too. About those<br />
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things which aren’t identity goods, I can’t say. Not enough experience.</p></p>
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