In a bookstore, Charles Bock's bleak urban drama Beautiful Children weighs in at 432 pages and will set you back $25.
On the Internet, thousands of people got it for nothing.
Publishers eager to expand their customer base have begun offering free downloads or streams of entire books - for a limited time - to spark word-of-mouth promotion and prompt readers to buy other books in the authors' catalogues. The move is the latest instance of a centuries-old industry experimenting with the Internet's vast reach to promote its products.
Last month, nearly 15,000 people took advantage of the three-day offer of free downloads of Beautiful Children on the Random House Web site; others participated through retailers Amazon.com and Booksamillion.com, which had joined the promotion. It was the first time Random House had offered free downloads of a whole book - one that had just hit the New York Times best-seller list, no less.
The idea of giving away all or part of a book's text is not new. For years, Web sites have made available reference books and classics that are no longer protected by copyright. Some writers have given away their own books and short stories online to increase their exposure. And earlier this year, more than 1 million copies of Suze Orman's Women & Money were downloaded after Oprah Winfrey made it available for free on her Web site for 33 hours.
Publishers are just latching onto the idea, and their authors - with some exceptions - are playing along.
"You browse in a bookstore by flipping pages - why wouldn't you do it online?" said Carol Schneider, a spokeswoman for Random House. "Are you really going to print out 400 pages online? I don't think so. We figured people would use it for sampling."
The thinking is that not only would most people balk at printing an entire book; they might not even read it front-to-back on a computer screen. The online offers are designed to entice readers to buy a hard copy of the book and, ideally, spring for others.
"If a reader is reading a free copy of a book and goes back and buys the author's other five books, this is a profitable experiment," said Carolyn Pittis, a senior vice president for marketing at HarperCollins, which last month began offering free electronic editions of several books on its Web site, including The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho, and Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy by Robert Irvine.
The HarperCollins Web site has quadrupled its page views since just before Christmas, when it first offered a free portion of a book online. In that case, readers could browse up to 20 percent of the text of a children's fable by Erin Hunter called Warriors: Power of Three No. 2: Dark River in the two weeks preceding its sales in stores. "It drove over 300,000 page views of the book," Pittis said, with 10,000 unique visitors looking at an average of 30 pages each.
Although some authors have balked at seeing their work given away like cereal-box toys, others long ago embraced the concept.
In 1999, horror and sci-fi writer Doug Clegg launched a so-called e-serial titled Naomi, a supernatural thriller set in Manhattan. The online unveiling was covered by Time, Business Week, the British Broadcasting Corp., National Public Radio and publications as far away as Germany and India.
"I went, within a few months, from a fairly obscure writer in the genre in which I'd been writing, to being known among its readers and publishers in New York and many booksellers," said Clegg, who later sold hardcover and paperback rights to Naomi. In 2001, his short novel Purity was made available in a cellphone version.
"These things gave my print books a shot, and soon I had movie deals, better book deals, more readers for my books," said Clegg, whose newsletter now has several thousand subscribers. "I went from barely making a living as a novelist to making a very good living."
Readers who are unfamiliar with an author may resist picking up one of his books, Clegg said. "The free downloads and e-serials help them decide if it's worth reading more. Libraries, booksellers, publishers, and the media find out about this, so that name recognition also grows for the writer."
But Clegg has only given away a handful of the more than 20 books he has written. "Any writer who does this needs to be cautious," he said. "There's a balance between 'free' and 'without value.' I don't do this with every novel or story, and I do it specifically with promotion of my name and work as the major part of the equation."
Neil Gaiman, whose book American Gods, first published in hardcover in 2001, was offered online in full last month by HarperCollins, also recognizes the benefits of free books. "I honestly don't see a downside," he said.
On his Web site's blog, Gaiman wrote on Feb. 29 that he was surprised to receive e-mails from "people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away." The protesters' premise seemed to be that "by handing out a best-selling book for nothing I'm devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly," he wrote.
"I like giving stuff away," he added. "I think it's sensible."
So does M.J. Rose, the author of nine novels - including Sheet Music, Flesh Tones and The Reincarnationist - and the woman behind AuthorBuzz.com, a marketing service that connects authors with readers, reading groups, booksellers and librarians.
"Writing is an art, and publising is a business," said Rose, who published her novel Lip Service online in 1998. "A lot of writers are not experts in the business or in marketing or advertising, so they don't understand the concept of free giveaways. Free is just about the best way for people to test your product. It's an opportunity to grow the writer's name, his career, his backlist and his next book."
Publishers, she said, cannot afford to launch marketing campaigns for all of the approximately 500 books that are published every day. Eighty-five percent of all books are allocated less than $2,500 in marketing costs.
For a fraction of that cost, on-line giveaways are tantamount to announcing, "We have a lot of books, and we'd like you to take some for a test drive," Rose said. "Give out a week of free books eight weeks before the book releases, and you have a serious buzz machine."
At the same time, with so many books being published, readers are suffering from "choice fatigue," she said.
"They literally haven't heard of 90 percent of them, so they wind up buying the names they know," said Rose, a former advertising executive who also covered the publishing industry for Wired.
When Internet promotions work, the rewards can be huge, Rose said. One example: marketing writer Seth Godin, who she said made "a killing" after putting his book Unleashing the Ideavirus online for free in 2000.
"I took a lot of flak when I did it, so eight years later I feel I should get some credit," Godin said from Salt Lake City, where he had just finished one of his lucrative speaking engagements. "The enemy is not piracy - the enemy is obscurity. When I put my book up for free, it was downloaded two million times. I was no longer obscure."
Godin then self-published 26,000 copies of a hardcover edition, at $40 each, and sold every one. He also sold the foreign-language rights to 17 countries, including Japan, where Ideavirus hit number 4 on the bestseller list.
"For all authors, if the idea spreads, you're going to win," said Godin, whose Web site lists 11 books under his authorship, all available for purchase. "Do whatever is necessary to spread the idea, regardless of whether you cut down more trees to publish more books."
Still, Daniel Menaker, a former editor-in-chief of the Random House Publishing Group and the host of an online literary interview show called Titlepage.tv, said the notion of free books on the Web is "a kind of glorious experiment."
It is too early to tell, he said, whether it will be a permanent part of the marketing landscape.
"What the phenomenon represents is further evidence that the dissemination of text is going through a terrific upheaval," he said. "We're in an information transition not seen since Gutenberg printed his Bible."
nick.madigan@baltsun.com