"Stanford Magazine carries a story this month about our chairman and co-founder Lawrence Lessig's book which has just entered its third printing. This is interesting because the book is freely available online for download (under a Creative Commons license), and has been downloaded about 180,000 times. On the one hand an author can give away free content for folks to remake into audio books, translations, and other formats, and the author still gets paid through traditional book sales. Amazing how that works, and works so well sometimes."
From Lessig's free book still racking up the sales | Creative Commons
Cannibals vs. Conversion
"Lessig's bottom line has to do with cannibals and converts. People who decide not to buy a book because it's free online represent the cannibalization rate. The conversion rate reflects the number of people who hear about a book because it's online, but decide to buy the hardcover because it's easier to read than the downloaded version. 'If the conversion rate is greater than the cannibalization rate, then you sell more books,' Lessig says."From Give It Away and They'll Buy It - STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2004 > Farm Report > News
A word about attribution
I saw this excellent news on Joi Ito's web log, whom attributes the quote to Creative Common's web log, who read about it on Copyfight, whom read about it on I/P Updates who made the post at 1:34 pm on July 26.Wow! That's quite a chain of attribution. On behalf of myself, Joi Ito, Creative Commons, and Copyfight I thank you William F. Heinz of I/P Updates. If you read this I'm just curious where you heard about the article? Did you hear it straight from the source (the Stanford Magazine) or did you read about it on someone else's blog or an RSS feed? My curiosity about the dissemination of information has now turned into a temporary obsession. I didn't realize how deep this rabbit hole went until I noticed Joi Ito's blog had an attribution on his attributed quote.
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