Il parle de son dernier roman placé en Creative Commons : Postsingular. Un roman que vous pouvez télécharger ici
"SPR: You offer your novel, Postsingular, for free online as a Creative Commons download. What’s your experience been with people downloading that book compared to people buying other novels through ebook distributors?
RR: Well, it was Corey Doctorow who talked me into this. Corey posts all of his novels as free ebooks, that is, as Creative Commons downloads in PDF, HTML, text and other formats—and he does this as soon as the novels come out in print. He argues that the free ebook release creates enough buzz and reader interest to outweigh any attrition in sales. And certainly Corey’s books do sell very well.
So I got my publisher, Tor Books, to give me permission to try this out with Postsingular. I posted some free ebook versions of the book online at my website, a couple of weeks after Tor printed the hardcover.
This did create some buzz, and I got some interesting fan email. Like one guy said, “I just read your novel on my phone,” and another said, “I read it on my screen in my cubicle at work.” As for the book’s actual sales, they were, I think, slightly better than my usual average, but not radically better, although we haven’t yet seen any numbers for the trade paperback edition, which just now came out.
So far as I know, Tor doesn’t want me to release a free ebook version of the forthcoming Hylozoic, which is a sequel to Postsingular. I wouldn’t mind doing one—after all, writers want first and foremost to be read—but there’s also an argument along the lines of, “We hooked them with a freebie, now let’s make them pay.” In any case, the hardback of Hylozoic comes out at the beginning of June, 2009, and by then we’ll have decided about any possible free ebook edition.
By the way, in addition to those reprints I was talking about, a couple of my novels are available as commercial ebooks to buy, and we really haven’t seen jack in sales—we’re selling dozens of ebooks, not thousands. At least until recently, most people have been utterly unwilling to buy ebooks, although plenty of people are happy to read free ebooks. Of course it could be that with devices like the Kindle, this is going to change."
