June 1, 2009
The Impact of Free (and Piracy) on Book Sales: An Update on The Piracy Project
As digital content has become more available and more commonly distributed in book publishing, fears of piracy and lost sales have grown.
While the debate over the impact of “free” content has been at times heated, the discussions are more often than not characterized by a lack of hard data. To address this data gap, O’Reilly Media began a project in 2008 to characterize the “free” universe, catalog and assess recent experiments, establish ways to measure the benefit or cost of free distribution and conduct some follow-on experiments of their own.
This podcast episode featuring Brian O’Leary, Principal of Magellan Media Consulting Partners, serves as an update on this ongoing study.
