The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

Alan Giles spent 20 years in bookselling with Waterstone’s and W H Smith. He retired as c.e.o. of HMV Group last year to take up non-executive and teaching roles.

Books for free

14.08.08

Last year publishers and booksellers looked on in alarm as Radiohead made digital downloads of their album "In Rainbows" available from their website, leaving fans to decide what price, if any, to pay. Ten months on, what can we conclude from this ground-breaking experiment?

Third-party commentators suggest fans paid sums varying from nothing to £40, with the average about £3. Despite not being available until nearly three months later, the conventional CD reached number one in both the UK and US, global sales are approaching two million units, the band are still on a massive global tour and the album is shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize.

So could Radiohead’s direct-to-fans "honesty box" model work for books? It’s easy for established creators with a huge, loyal fan base to experiment in this way. Radiohead pulled off a massive publicity stunt, and Thom Yorke is hardly scratching around to find his next mortgage payment. But aspiring writers, and those yet to taste significant commercial success, will be ill-equipped to go straight to the public.

But here’s the most surprising conclusion from "In Rainbows"; despite an explicit invitation by the band to legally download the album for free, huge numbers chose to do so illegally. Research by Will Page, chief economist of copyright organisation MCPS-PRS Alliance, and Eric Garland, c.e.o. of online media researcher Big Champagne, reported 400,000 such "torrents" in the first day, and 2.3 million over the first 25 days. Yet by any standards the album has been a huge commercial success. Page and Garland conclude that "torrents and legal downloads are complements, not competitors".

In the 1980s the record industry publicly argued that "home taping is killing music", while recognising that hard-up students who had developed a love of music through illegally copying might become core buyers in later life. But for the past 10 years, the industry has been reeling from rampant, near-perfect quality internet piracy and has responded with a raft of protectionist policies (restrictive digital rights management and litigation). Radiohead’s experiment suggests that the relaxed ambivalence of the 1980s might still be right today.

With the arrival of Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle likely to put digital book content conveniently and affordably into readers’ hands, the question of how to respond to the threat of piracy is now facing our industry. The "In Rainbows" case study should make us think carefully about how we view piracy.

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