It’s here.

The article I’ve been so excited to see published. David Wiley and I wrote this article and  I am grateful to The Journal of Electronic Publishing for publishing it. Although there is much to be done in the area of how giving away digital copies influence print sales I think this article makes a contribution to the discussion. Special thanks to JEP for making this article available in advance of the full issue coming out.

The Short-Term Influence of Free Digital Versions of Books on Print Sales is available here.

I welcome comments, questions and suggestions. The basic idea of the article is as follows:

A vital question for those with a commercial stake in selling books is, “What happens to book sales if digital versions are given away?” We tracked 41 books for which we could identify the date when the free digital versions of the books were made available to determine whether the free version affected print sales. We analyzed book sales for the eight weeks before and after the free versions were available.  Books were placed into four categories; three of the four categories of books had increased sales after the free books were distributed.

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!

This past year I wrote a book about how to get more of the true meaning of Christmas in our lives at Christmas time. Unfortunately, the way things worked out it was not published this year; however, the publisher has graciously made a free electronic copy of it available (site registration required). Even better they allowed the book to be licensed with a BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. As far as I know, this is the first time a book for the LDS market has been released with a CC-license.  My book, I Lost My Phone Number, Can I Have Yours? also has a CC license, but it wasn’t originally released that way.

I’m curious to see what (if anything) will happen as a result of the book having a CC license. I Lost My Phone Number… was translated into Portuguese after it was released with this license, and a Spanish translation is in process as well. I hope that the CC license on this Christmas book will likewise stimulate deriviatives that will further the impact of the work.

In a future study it would be very interesting to survey the people who downloaded the books to determine if the free book downloads had any educational impact. Of those 100,000 book downloads, how many have been read in their entirety? How many have been read even a little? Because we didn’t collect any information on those who downloaded books (to encourage downloads) we cannot do this study at this point. But I think it would make for a good one in the future.