More on OA books stimulating sales of TA books

John Joseph Adams interviews Cory Doctorow in Sci Fi Weekly for September 20, 2006.  Excerpt:

You make much of your work available free online as Creative Commons-licensed downloads. What prompted you to give your work away for free, and how difficult was it to convince your publishers to go along with the idea?

It's just good business. As publisher Tim O'Reilly says, an author's worst problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Of all the people who failed to buy one of my books today, the vast majority did so because they never heard of them, not because they got a free digital copy from the Internet. Indeed, a digital copy makes the print copy more valuable, since it adds utility in the form of portability, ease of reproduction, searching and archiving, and so on. In short, giving away ebooks sells print books.

It's a great moment to be an SF writer. SF appears to be the only fiction that anyone cares about enough to really aggressively steal over the Internet. I'd rather be in the "worth stealing" camp than the "beneath notice" camp. As with every revolution in information production and dissemination, Internet-based copying will create lots of opportunities for attentive, entrepreneurial artists who don't turn crybaby the minute last year's business model is threatened by next year's. I'm going to be one of the entrepreneurs.

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was behind me all the way on this. It was a no-brainer for him and Tor, and the books have sold well enough that there's never been any question as to whether I'll continue the experiment.