News

A pair of Canadian book publishers dipped their toes ever deeper into the online world this week by offering free digital downloads of entire books.

House of Anansi Press and HarperCollins Canada have decided to make the full text of a single book available to readers for a limited time, hoping to attract new readers, raise the authors' profiles and boost sales of traditional copies.

Jon Evans's mass-market paperback Invisible Armies can be read for free until June 30 through the HarperCollins read-only interface called Browse Inside, which normally allows readers access to excerpts of books. HarperCollins chose Evans because of his enthusiasm for the experiment and for his status as an established writer with a solid following that they hope to expand.

As of yesterday, Anansi has made young author Pasha Malla's debut collection of short stories available as a downloadable PDF file that cannot be printed. Their goal is to shed a spotlight on a young writer whom they consider promising by giving access to the book online for a week.

"We didn't feel like we were going to risk anything in terms of the book's sales," Anansi president Sarah MacLachlan said. "I could be delusional in this, but I really don't think the digital book has come of age, so I don't think that people would prefer to read something digitally than they would to own the actual book."

The experiments are relatively novel amongst Canada's larger publishers, which have been slower to dabble in free content than their international counterparts, but not unprecedented.

In 1997, Coach House Books, a smaller publisher operating on a tight budget, was years ahead of the curve when they began posting full books in HTML, the format commonly used for Web-page text. The publisher released more than 70 titles, which are permanently available on their website, though they abandoned the practice to save labour costs, according to editor-in-chief Alana Wilcox.

"We took some flak for it at the time. People said, 'This is crazy'," Wilcox said.

That two more major publishers are entertaining notions of expanding the use of free online content suggests the emergence of a publishing world that is more receptive to technological change.

"The paperback was the last great revolution in physical book production, so we're all flirting with it at some level or another, this idea of digital," MacLachlan said.