Chris Anderson (Wiki), the author of Long Tail, has released his new book “FREE” on scribd.com in an electronic book format. You can read the full book at the comfort of your personal computer.
Here is the the customer experience for sampling/buying a book:
- First, you must phone or check online to see if the closest bookstore carries the book. If they do not, you must request them to order some for you, and then wait for days until they call you back to notify you that the 5 copies are now available, and that you can only hold it for 48 hours until they sell it to someone else.
- If they otherwise carry the book in store, you must immediately drive to the store and get it. Speaking of driving, I hope you are not too concern about the gas price, traffic jam and carbon footprint, since it is quite some overhead to travel for a distance to get a stack of paper bound together.
- If you want to first read a few chapters of the book to see if it’s really your thing, you will have to either stand next to the shelves, sit on the floor or bring own foldable chair to sit on for hours. Keep in mind that there are only few copies of the book, so people may want to just buy the one you’re reading now. By the way, the store closes at 8pm.
Now with the newer Amazon model:
- You can “Look Inside”, sample the table of content and a few random pages that are not connected and hardly making sense. At the time I write this post, Amazon still hasn’t open the “Look Inside” feature for this book.
- You can still pre-order the book online, so when the book is available, Amazon will ship it to your house. Still, I don’t really like the overhead of carbon footprint and stuff, but I’m cool with that.
- Sure, they have Kindle (which is not available in Canada) that can take away those tree chopping, printing and logistic stuffs, but still you cannot sample the full book just like you could in the bookstore.
Now with full book viewing on Scribd.com:
- 24/7 reading at your personal computer: no store hours, standing by the bookshelves and angry eyes on your back for keeping the book too long.
- Sample the book as much as you want, since it is fully available to you. Not just the table of content and a few random pages.
- Immediate purchasing in PDF so you can load it into other reader gadgets of choice.
This free, full book reviewing concept is still not very popular in main stream publishing industry, but I am really looking forward to see some smart publisher, who gets it and understand that the value of the “free” is so powerful and manipulative.
You can learn more about Chris Anderson on his website at http://www.longtail.com.
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