Last week, Chad Post of Three Percent was inspired by a publishing-themed episode of NPR’s On the Media—specifically Chris Anderson‘s reiteration of his suggestion that more books should be distributed for free—to propose nonprofit publishers consider giving it away. “In the nonprofit world, we usually don’t talk as much about sales as we do about reaching readers,” Post says, “about finding a way to cultivate an audience for a book or author outside of the traditional marketplace model. So the idea of someone underwriting a book that’s truly just given away isn’t all that crazy… and would probably ‘only’ cost $35,000 or so, depending on how many you wanted to give away.”
(In fact, this is not such a radical idea: In California, the Sati Institute for Buddhist Studies and Metta Forest Monastery have been giving away five volumes of Buddhist philosophy in translation for some time.)
I came across this post via The Literary Saloon, which raises an interesting tangential point: “One of the things that has always astonished us is that non-profit publishers don’t offer their wares more cheaply,” M.A. Orthofer (I assume) writes. “Surely that should be part of their mission and mandate, but fiction titles by university presses, in particular, seem to often have list prices that are considerably higher than what for-profits charge for what appear to be similar texts.” (Back in September, longtime GalleyCat readers might recall, James F. Reische had some thoughts on that subject; short version: It’s Ronald Reagan’s fault.)
Whatever the answer to the cheaper/freer books question might turn out to be, I keep circling back to this Chris Anderson quote from the radio show:
“I think the traditional publishing industry probably serves about 2,000 authors well. Meanwhile, there’s 200,000 books published each year. So there’s 198,000 authors who really [LAUGHS] need to find a better way.”