Slide deck from Challenging notions of âfreeâ, presented at the 2009 O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference:

http://www.toccon.com/toc2009/public/schedule/detail/7582

As digital content has become more available and more commonly distributed in book publishing, fears of piracy and lost sales have grown. The rise of peer-to-peer file sharing sites has likely amplified these fears. While the debate over the impact of âfreeâ content has been at times heated, the discussions are more often than not characterized by a lack of hard data.

To address this data gap, OâReilly Media began a project in 2008 to characterize the âfreeâ universe, catalog and assess recent experiments, establish ways to measure the benefit or cost of free distribution and conduct some follow-on experiments of our own. OâReilly is joined in this effort by Random House, which contributed data for several of its own tests.

Come to this session to hear an interim report on the initial phase of this ongoing study, including a preliminary model of where and when free distribution works as well as whatâs worth continuing to track over time.

Sign up here for the full report when it is released:

http://toc.oreilly.com/reports/p2p/

Brian OâLeary
Magellan Media

Mac Slocum
Tools of Change for Publishing

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