According to the Guardian, and GalleyCat, historian Ben Wilson’s next book What Price Liberty? will be released electronically in April according to the Radiohead model, which means it will be free to download and readers will be encouraged to pay whatever they feel like for it.
I think this is excellent. This model was very successful with Radiohead’s album, but BitTorrent fearmongers like to say that Radiohead only succeeded with that model because they already had a wide, die-hard fan base. You certainly can’t say that about Ben Wilson; I’m sure he’s great, but how many historians have die-hard fan bases?
The problem with a lot of the downloading/piracy debate is that there isn’t really much data to back up one side or the other, so a lot of it becomes shouting in the dark. This one experiment certainly won’t solve that lack of data, but hopefully experimentation with different digital distribution models will continue to expand.
I predict that this will work quite well for this book. Free digital downloads will hook people into getting this book, and then guilt or well-meaning will get a good price out of most of them. If people are treated nicely, they tend to reciprocate; most humans learn this by adulthood, the record companies, though, don’t quite seem to grasp it.
But if this scheme works, the anti-DRM, pro-digital format crowd shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too hard. The fact that it’s pay-what-you-like will act as its own piece of publicity, and that will drive sales in and of itself. This model won’t work–at least not this well–forever. Radiohead already abandoned it, and Trent Reznor says they half-assed it anyway.
Still, any step toward proving BitTorrent is not the fourth horseman of the new media apocalypse is a good step in my book.
