To promote Blogging Heroes, a collection of “interviews with 30 of the world’s top bloggers,” Michael Banks and Wiley are giving each of the book’s subjects the opportunity to publish a PDF file of their interviews for free download on their site. Early adopters include Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, BoingBoing‘s Mark Frauenfelder, David Rothman, Steve Garfield, and Gary Lee.
“It will be interesting to see how well this works,” Anderson commented as he put up his interview. “Will these samples encourage people to buy the book to get all the chapters, neatly wrapped in a convenient package? Or is something as fragmented and bitty as 30 short interviews so easy to consume in small chunks that the free samples satisfy most of the demand, rather than stimulate it? Because the chapters are all on different blogs it’s hard to read them all together, so this isn’t the same as simply giving the whole book away in one download. But as an experiment in leveraging the power of free samples to sell books, it will be worth watching all the same.”