1. What motivated you to provide free digital versions of books?
2. How did free digital distribution affect the distribution of your work?
3. How did free digital distribution affect the impact of your work?
4. Are you glad they made your books freely available?
5. What effect (if any) do you think does free digital distribution have on print sales?

The authors we interviewed were:

1. Hal Abelson (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Blown to Bits)
2. Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks)
3. James Boyle (The Shakespeare Chronicles, The Public Domain)
4. Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , A Place So Foreign and Eight More, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Little Brother, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, Content).
5. Leander Kahney (The Cult of Mac, The Cult of iPod).
6. Chris Kelty (Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet).
7. Lawrence Lessig (Code, Free Culture, The Future of Ideas).
8. Kembrew McLeod (Freedom of Expression).
9. Eric Schulman (A Briefer History of Time).
10. Eric Von Hippel (The Sources of Innovation, Democratizing Innovation).

The authors’ responses are (in my opinion) extremely interesting. Major motivations for making work freely available include “to increase visibility,” “to increase sales,” and “it’s a moral obligation.” All of the authors were glad that they had made they work available for free, and most reported that they thought it had increased the reach of their work. Nobody perceived that sales had decreased as a result.

A few excerpts:

“I think that openness has extended the long tail of my book. It may not have sold a large amount when it was first released, but it continues to sell well. I think part of that is the visibility that open licensing created and the good will it has created.” — Kembrew McLeod

“The number of people who tell me they would never have seen the book had it not been freely licensed is extraordinary.” –Lawrence Lessig

Eric Von Hippel reported that sales of his book were double the publisher’s initial estimates. In addition to these sales, Von Hippel’s book was downloaded 90,000 times from his website.

“The number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, “Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I’m not gonna buy it.”” –Cory Doctorow

Another facet of paper was a two year case study looking at what happened to sales of Lessig’s The Future of Ideas over the year following it being made available for free. We compared sales of The Future of Ideas with sales of Lessig’s Free Culture (which had been free from inception). I won’t give any spoilers here as to what happened.

I personally gained a lot from talking with these authors and am very grateful for the opportunity I had to work with them. They were kind and gracious in sharing their knowledge and insights.

Special thanks to Tech Trends for honoring the Sparc Addendum, and allowing the article to be placed in BYU’s Institutional repository. You can access the article here.

What

Deseret Book placed eight books online for free download. All of these were “backlist” titles. This study tracked what happened as a result of those books being available.

When

The books were placed online September 9, 2009. This study compares sales of these books the ten weeks before they were available for free with the ten weeks after.

Results

During the ten weeks of the study the books were downloaded 102,556 times. Collectively, the books sold 68 more copies in the ten weeks they were online for free versus the ten previous weeks. This was an increase in sales of 26%. Over the same period of time in 2008, sales of these same books decreased by 38%. Furthermore, a study of comparison titles that were not put online for free found that sales of comparison books decreased both in 2008 and 2009, as illustrated below.

Thus the increase in sales of the eight featured books in 2009 seems attributable to their being available for free.

Other interesting findings include the following: Visits to the online product pages of the free books increased 1,085% during the study. Some weeks, hits to http://deseretbook.com/free represented almost 3% of total traffic to http://deseretbook.com. (note: the books are still available, but now require registration. They did not during the experimental period of the dissertation). During the ten weeks of the study more people entered http://deseretbook.com through http://deseretbook.com/free than any other page (except the home page). All this happened with very little advertising.  Though the impact of this additional web traffic was not quantified, it seems that the value of increasing awareness of http://deseretbook.com could be significant.

There was a moderately strong correlation (r=.65) between downloads and Internet print sales (the more books that were downloaded, the more books were purchased online).  Thus if more books had been available and downloaded the number of additional books sold would likely have increased.

Another interesting point is that the authors of the books made available seemed very pleased with the additional exposure their books received. One of the eight books studied was out of print. This book was downloaded 14,914 times and its product page received 834 hits. This may indicate a lingering interest in out-of-print books, and may validate a “long tail” approach to book sales.

Limitations

One limitation of the present study is the relatively small number of books studied, and that the sales of these books were relatively small. The study could also have been strengthened if it were of a longer duration.

One area that remains to be researched is the perspective of the authors whose books were downloaded. In informal conversations with the authors whose books were used in this study, they expressed positive feelings about their work being disseminated more widely. It may be that authors, particularly those with books that are not currently selling well, would desire the increased exposure to the work that free digital downloads might bring.

Although this study provides some interesting results, there are many other questions to be considered. One question that might arise is, “What would have happened if the e-books had been for sale for 99 cents each?” If 10% of the people who downloaded the books for free would have paid 99 cents for the e-books, that would have provided a nice profit for Deseret Book. While it is possible that some people would have paid 99 cents for the e-books, it seems likely that people would have been less inclined to e-mail friends and blog about a “99-cent” offer than a “free” offer.” Future studies are needed to determine how many downloads would occur if they were very inexpensive instead of free.

Another aspect that should be considered is how much the popularity of electronic book devices (such as the Kindle or iPad) will change people’s proclivities to read digital books. Perhaps most important, if publishers made all or most of their books available for free digital consumption, would that have an overall negative effect on sales? In other words, in the present study the seven books saw increased sales, likely due to the special attention they received from being downloaded 102,556 times. If all books were available for free online would they see this same sales benefit? Obviously not.

So, much more to think about and explore! Hopefully this dissertation will be a part of an ongoing conversation. They said nobody ever reads dissertations…prove them wrong…go read it!

As part of an Open Education class last year, David Wiley, Jared Stein, Aaron Johnson and I worked together to write an article explaining different levels of “openness” in “open educational resources.” As I blogged about early, this article was recently published by Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning. A version of this article is now available here through BYU’s repository.

Citation for article:

Hilton, J. Wiley, D. Stein, J., Johnson, A. (2010). “The four R’s of openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources.” Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Volume 25: No. 1: pp. 37-44. The official published version is available here.

Abstract:

A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. However “open” is not a simple dichotomy; rather, there is a continuum of openness. We discuss four separate aspects of reuse and demonstrate how these describe different levels of openness. We discuss how the licensing and technical aspects of open educational resources affect the relative openness of an OER. Implications for those creating open educational resources are discussed.

It’s available here.

Citation for article:

Hilton, J. Wiley, D. (2010). “The creation and use of Open Educational Resources in Christian higher education.” Christian Higher Education, Volume 9: No. 1: pp. 49-59. The official published version is available here.

Abstract:

A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources (OER). By “open” it is generally meant that the resources are freely available to others to reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources; this openness is also specifically manifest in the field of Christian higher education. Different levels are discussed in which OER can be “open” and the implications of these levels when creating OER. Common motivations and obstacles to creating OER are also discussed. A particularly significant issue regarding openness concerns copyright issues. Finally, discussed are copyright implications both in terms of reusing resources others have made (resources that may or may not be copyrighted), and using Creative Commons licenses to license OER so as to give the desired level of copyright protection. Although OER are not appropriate in all situations, they can be an important part of improving pedagogy and increasing access to education.

• Hilton, J. Wiley, D. (2010). “The creation and use of Open Educational Resources in Christian higher education.” Christian Higher Education, Volume 9: No. 1: pp. 49-59.

and

• Hilton, J. Wiley, D. Stein, J., Johnson, A. (2010). “The four R’s of openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources.” Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Volume 25: No. 1: pp. 37-44.

Unfortunately (and ironically), neither of these articles are open access (though we did try using the SPARC addendum). Our contract does allow us to post versions in BYU’s institutional repository, which we are in the process of doing. More on that when it happens.

If by chance you already have access to articles via Informa World you can find the articles here and here.

Special thanks to my coauthors in these articles who have added so much to my thinking.

These chapters are available at the below link:

Hilton Dissertation for web

On another note — all the data for the dissertation. has been collected. Here is the short version of the results:

102,556 free e-books were downloaded during the study (18,000 more since the study “ended”). This number seems to be sufficiently large to indicate that there is a demand for free e-books and that enough people viewed them as to possibly have an impact on sales.
In the ten weeks following the free books being made available, sales of the seven books studied increased 25.9%. In contrast, the previous year sales of these seven books decreased 38.2% over the same time period. Furthermore, in 2009 the comparison books declined 15.6% (even after the title with the largest decreases in sales had been excluded). In 2008 the comparison books declined 6.4% (after the two titles with the largest decreases in sales had been excluded). Thus, based on historical and comparison sales it would be expected that print sales of the seven books would decrease during the ten weeks following the free versions of the books being made available. This decrease would be expected not as a result of the free versions; rather, it would be expected based on the fact that sales decreased the year previously, and well as for the comparison titles. However, sales did not decrease. The fact that sales increased when a decrease was to be expected is one of the most important findings of this study.

More to come!

Something I’ve been thinking about is the law of diminishing returns. As you might remember from Econ 110, this law states that the more one gets of something the less valuable each additional unit may be. For example, I might get 10 units of pleasure out of eating 1 piece of pizza. The second piece of pizza may give me 7 units of pleasure, 4 units from the third piece, and a fourth piece may give me no additional pleasure.

Do we ever get to a point where we have “enough” teaching resources and that providing more provide little marginal return?

Consider the following scenario.

A private educational organization has a set curriculum that it teaches students. For the sake of example, let’s say that this is a Christian organization and that the curriculum for the year is the  New Testament.

Teachers have access to the following:

1. A teachers manual

2. A student manual

3. A DVD that contains multi-media

In addition there are magazine articles, supplementary video clips, pictures, and PowerPoint presentations that all are made available to teachers by the organization.

As I have studied Open Educational Resources, I have thought that one thing that would really help a teacher in this course would to collect lesson ideas from other teachers (like Curriki) and allow teachers to share clever lesson ideas and ways to engage students. I’m probably prideful, but I think I have some great ideas that other teachers could benefit from. And I’ve definitely seen other teachers with resources that I would love to get my hands on.

However, some might argue that the teachers of this course already have a plethora of resources. If a teacher were to teach Matthew 5, it could easily take him an hour to read Matthew 5 and review all of the resources that the organization had already provided. If something like Curriki were made available, would there be a danger of having “too much” curriculum? Is it possible that some teachers would spend so much time going through the different ideas that were out there that they would neglect to spend enough time on actually preparing their lessons? If these are dangers, how significant are they?