{"id":149,"date":"2004-01-07T14:10:12","date_gmt":"2004-01-07T19:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=149"},"modified":"2017-03-24T02:07:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T06:07:15","slug":"the-web-and-identity-goods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=149","title":{"rendered":"The Web and Identity Goods"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>InstaPundit <a href='http:\/\/www.instapundit.com\/archives\/013407.php'>writes<\/a>:<br \/>\n<em>This seems to me to suggest that free downloads don&#8217;t do much to<br \/>\ncannibalize actual [book] sales.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I have more (or at least longer-term) experience with this than<br \/>\nanyone else.  Back in 1991, <cite>The New Hacker&#8217;s Dictionary<\/cite><br \/>\nwas the very first real book (like, with an ISBN) to be released<br \/>\nsimultaneously in print and available for free download on-line. Both<br \/>\nof the books I&#8217;ve done since, <cite>The Cathedral and the<br \/>\nBazaar<\/cite> and <cite>The Art of Unix Programming<\/cite>, have also<br \/>\nbeen released for free download at the same time they were in print.<br \/>\nYou can easily find all three on <a href='http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/'>my<br \/>\nwebsite<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Of all my books, only the very first (<cite>Portable C and Unix<br \/>\nSystems Programming<\/cite>, 1987) didn&#8217;t get webbed.  It was a decent<br \/>\nseller, but the least successful of my books. It&#8217;s now out of print, made<br \/>\ntechnically obsolete by things that happened in the early 1990s.  All<br \/>\nthree of my other books, the ones that got webbed, have remained<br \/>\ncontinuously in print.<\/p>\n<p>My four books do not a controlled experiment make, but the<br \/>\nthirteen years of experience with simultaneous print and Web<br \/>\npublication that I&#8217;ve had suggests that Web availability has boosted<br \/>\nthe sales of the print versions tremendously.  And my publishers<br \/>\nagree.  Even in 1991 I didn&#8217;t get resistance from MIT press, and<br \/>\nAddison-Wesley was positively supportive of putting my most most<br \/>\nrecent one on the Web.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m one of a handful of technical-book writers who publishers treat<br \/>\nlike rock stars, because I have a large fan base and my name on a<br \/>\ncover will sell a book in volumes that are exceptional for its<br \/>\ncategory (for comparison my editor at AW mentions Bruce Eckel as<br \/>\nanother).  I&#8217;m not certain my experience generalizes to authors who<br \/>\n<em>aren&#8217;t<\/em> rock stars.  On the other hand, it&#8217;s more than<br \/>\npossible that I&#8217;m a rock star largely because I <em>have<\/em> been<br \/>\nthrowing my stuff on the Web since 1991. It&#8217;s even likely &mdash;<br \/>\nafter all, I was next to an unknown when I edited <cite>The New Hacker&#8217;s<br \/>\nDictionary<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p>So I don&#8217;t find the InstaWife&#8217;s experience very surprising.<br \/>\nWebbing one&#8217;s books seems to be really effective way to build a fan<br \/>\nbase. My impression is that people start by browsing the the on-line<br \/>\nversions of my books, then buy the paper copy partly for convenience<br \/>\nand partly as what marketers call an identity good.<\/p>\n<p>An identity good is something people buy to express their tie to a<br \/>\ngroup or category they belong to or would like to belong to.  People<br \/>\nbuy <cite>The New Hacker&#8217;s Dictionary<\/cite> because they are, or want<br \/>\nto be, the kind of person they think should own a copy of it.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the causal connection: A Web version can&#8217;t be an identity<br \/>\ngood, because it doesn&#8217;t sit on your bookshelf or your coffee table<br \/>\ntelling everybody (and reminding you!) who you are.  But Web exposure<br \/>\ncan, I think, help turn a book with the right kind of potential into<br \/>\nan identity good. I suspect there is now a population of psychologists<br \/>\nand social workers who perceive the InstaWife&#8217;s book as an identity<br \/>\ngood, and that (as with my stuff) that perception was either created or<br \/>\nstrongly reinforced by web exposure.<\/p>\n<p>If so, this would explain why webbing her book made the auction<br \/>\nprice for the out-of-print paper version go up.  The price of the<br \/>\npaper version reflects buyers&#8217; desires to be identifiable as members<br \/>\nof the community of readers of the book.  By making softcopy available<br \/>\nfor download, the InstaWife enhanced the power of the paper version as<br \/>\nan identity token, by making it easy for a larger population to learn<br \/>\nthe meaning of the token.<\/p>\n<p>I would go so far as to predict that any book (or movie, or CD)<br \/>\nthat functions as an identity good will tend to sell more rather than<br \/>\nless after Web exposure.  All three of my in-print books happen to be<br \/>\nidentity goods rather strongly, for slightly different but overlapping<br \/>\npopulations. I suspect the InstaWife&#8217;s book has this quality too.  About those<br \/>\nthings which aren&#8217;t identity goods, I can&#8217;t say.  Not enough experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>InstaPundit writes: This seems to me to suggest that free downloads don&#8217;t do much to cannibalize actual [book] sales. I have more (or at least longer-term) experience with this than anyone else. Back in 1991, The New Hacker&#8217;s Dictionary was the very first real book (like, with an ISBN) to be released simultaneously in print&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=149\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Web and Identity Goods<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7447,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/7447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}