Giving Away Free Books

by Tim O'Reilly
November 2000

I had a funny experience with author copies in the early days of the the Internet craze, maybe 1993. There were three books out, our Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, Brendan Kehoe's Zen and the Art of the Internet from PH, and Tracy Laquey's Internet Companion from Addison-Wesley. I was at a trade show (I don't remember which one), and Tracy and I were talking with Steve Wolff, who at the time was the person at the National Science Foundation who had oversight over the internet backbone. I gave him a copy of The Whole Internet User's Guide, and Tracy pointed out mournfully that her publisher didn't give her very many free copies, and she didn't have one to give him. Fortunately, we were standing right by the Computer Literacy booth, and so I went over and asked them for one on her behalf, which they were happy to give. (I think I actually traded them for an additional O'Reilly book that I had with me.)

There are so many times when an author has an opportunity to promote their book, and publishers should be as supportive of this practice as possible. Obviously, there is potential for abuse, which is why this works only if your entire business model supports it, with mutual respect and collaboration on marketing between the publisher and author.

But there's another, deeper point here. Publishers and authors need to look beyond just promoting their books. Giving away a copy of a competitor's book might seem counter-intuitive for a publisher, but it was part of a larger strategy that I've always followed, namely that promoting the subject of my books is more important than promoting the books themselves. It can be better to share a larger market than own a smaller one. But more than that, if you really believe in what you're writing and publishing, it's not a zero sum game where you're trying to steal market share from competitors. You're really trying to increase the sum of human knowledge, not just increase the number of shekels in your pocket. Being expansive about knowledge sharing should be a key driver for authors and publishers alike. For more on this subject, see the text of my talk Beyond the Book."

P.S. That conversation with Steve Wolff has a small but more important part in Internet history as well. It was just at the time that we were about to roll out the Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first web portal/catalog/magazine, and the first site on the net to use advertising as its business model. For those who weren't around at the time, there had been a very strong tradition of no commercial activity on the net, backed up by what was called the AUP, or Acceptable Use Policy, of the NSF. I told Steve what we were up to and asked his blessing. He said "Our mandate is the support of research and education. If you guys aren't in support of research and education, I don't know who is. Go for it." I still treasure that moment.

We went live a week or two later. There was a huge flap at first, with a Wall Street Journal article about how this was a sea change in the net. We had a wave of protest from customers that lasted about a week. I pointed out that the web was different, in that people came to you, and the advertising was actually living on your site (rather than sent out as a kind of spam). It turned around very quickly, with people who'd at first said they wouldn't buy from us any more asking a week later if they could advertise on the site. The rest is history, as they say.

Not that I necessarily feel good about all of that history. This was one of those things that had some unforeseen consequences! If I'd realized that this was the first step in an attempt to turn the web into something that looked a lot more like television, a side trip that's lasted seven years and is only now running its course, I might have thought twice about uncorking the genie from the bottle. Though I imagine someone else would have done it if we hadn't....