[KedarMhaswade]

This is a very good thought! It's important for an author to break the barrier to entry for the potential readers of his/her work. It's not always easy or practical. Another way of doing this is publishing something in book form what you have already published elsewhere, e.g. your blog. After all, what a reader of free books, user of free and open source software is spending is the often neglected non-renewable source of energy -- her/his time!

Sometimes however, authors consider their book(s) as their 'life's work'. It's hard to imagine giving it away for free. Psychologically speaking, though best things in life are often free, some people think that something that is 'expensive' is 'good' -- they somewhat erroneously believe that 'cheapness and quality don't go together'.

A related point that I have always wondered about is deciding the price of your creation. For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing to name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an author to come up with the price of her book. By making it free on the website and leaving it up to the publisher to do the hard work seems like a reasonable way to get around this problem.

[munificent]

> Sometimes however, authors consider their book(s) as their 'life's work'. It's hard to imagine giving it away for free.

I don't think of my book as necessarily my life's work, but it's certainly one of the most significant things I've done. People can read it online without paying cash, but I don't think of that as being "free".

I do get compensated, even then. Every time someone tells me they liked my book, or enjoy my writing style, or finally understand something they've struggled with, it feels absolutely fantastic. Given how much money we spent purchasing good feelings, in many ways I feel like I just cut out the middle man. :)

> A related point that I have always wondered about is deciding the price of your creation. For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing to name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an author to come up with the price of her book.

I just did the obvious thing: looked at a bunch of similar products and priced it in the same ballpark.

[jonnathanson]

All of this is well said. This bears mentioning, though:

"For stable businesses it is perhaps a straightforward thing to name the price of a creation, but I imagine it would be hard for an author to come up with the price of her book."

Pricing is an extraordinarily difficult problem in any business endeavor, be it publishing, software, semiconductors, or lightbulbs. Obviously it's easier in long-standing industries, or in quasi-monopolistic markets. But it's never straightforward or easy.

Pricing is even harder in content businesses. First, because at least in the big-business side, so many parties have a finger in the pie, and need to be accounted for in the margin. Second, because there is no generally accepted consumer "spectrum" of price/length, price/format, price/category, price/perceived-value, etc. The guessing process is 50% science (SQL, Excel, R, benchmarks, etc.) and 50% art ("WTF will Segment A consider a decent price for Version X? Or Segment B for Version Y?")

Of course, the other big constraint is rigidity. You can't really test, adjust, or offer promotional pricing on most publishing platforms or book markets. (And to whatever extent you can, you risk consumer backlash and confusion.) So whatever you decide right out of the gate, you're usually stuck with for awhile. A promising practice -- as the author of this blog post alludes to -- is to offer different prices (and sometimes, slightly different versions) to different audiences, who might come across the book at different touchpoints. One size does not fit all, and I suspect we'll see a lot more recognition of that fact in the book market in the coming years.