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Being a big dig­i­tal book advo­cate it’s been inter­est­ing to watch the accep­tance of dig­i­tal down­loads. While I believe in giv­ing away a free book to get some­one inter­est­ed I’m not sure that giv­ing away a whole library is the best pol­i­cy for a new seg­ment of an old indus­try. I don’t recall the music busi­ness giv­ing away 100’s of songs (Nap­ster exclud­ed) to get momen­tum.

My con­cern is “free” decreas­es the val­ue of a prod­uct and too much “free” in this case would send an indus­try into a tail­spin.

I’m a dig­i­tal pub­lish­er and my con­tent own­ers would nev­er allow us to give their books away unless there was some pro­mo­tion involved. I get pub­lic domain and I know libraries allow you to check out the same book over and over, I hope that this ser­vice and oth­ers like it will refrain from giv­ing away titles that cre­ate jobs and income for peo­ple in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness.

I’m with Rick. Free con­tent is not val­ued. Pub­lic libraries have nev­er been tru­ly “free,” as they are sup­port­ed by tax rev­enues col­lect­ed from the pop­u­la­tion of poten­tial users.

In the case of dig­i­tal resources, with­out some nom­i­nal trans­ac­tion fee (maybe a small sub­scrip­tion for pub­lic domain works), there will be a burst of uneven dis­tri­b­u­tion and then a pre­cip­i­tous dis­ap­pear­ance of con­tent. Free dis­tri­b­u­tion also sets up the unhealthy expec­ta­tion on the part of users to get more con­tent for free — that is, retail con­tent from liv­ing or recent­ly deceased authors.