My latest column in Locus Magazine has just gone live. Called "Free(konomic) E-books," it's an attempt to enumerate the evidence that Creative Commons and other scheme for giving away free ebooks works to sell printed books. In my next column, I'l expain how Creative Commons works, and how science fiction writers can use it.
Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.
More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position — just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices).
