open access publishing and sales

There have been understandable questions as to whether making books available free of charge in open access format would cut into sales. After all, why would someone pay for a book if they can get it without paying anything?

I have nothing to report here but anecdotes, not hard numbers, but you may find the anecdotes interesting. Prince of Networks is among my top-selling books despite being available as a free PDF on the re.press website.

Levi’s The Democracy of Objects, even though it’s been available free of charge in HTML version on the web since September, and will now be available free as a PDF, hit an Amazon sales rank as good as 9,800 today (extremely high for philosophy).

Now, I think there’s still a legitimate question for the future. People are still buying paper books, perhaps, because people aren’t yet on PDF-reading devices in sufficient numbers as their primary reading medium. How many people do you know at present who primarily do their reading on electronic devices? In my circles, just a handful, though it’s growing. Once that happens, we’ll see if people are willing to pay for an eBook when they can get a free PDF of the same book (I don’t see why they would be).

Then there’s another consideration. Twisting Dr. Johnson’s wording, I would say: “None but a fool ever wrote philosophy books for money.”

My books sell reasonably well, and thus I continue to run into people who assume that I am rich from these books. I always try to be polite, even while biting my lip so as not to burst into laughter. My total lifetime royalties from 2002 to today, on all 10 books (if you count the French version of L’Objet quadruple as a separate book) is still considerably less than one year’s salary for me as a university Full Professor.

I’ve seen Bruno Latour’s sales figures as well. And while solid, they are not as solid as his intellectual reputation is.

The people who make enough money on writing to live are successful novelists, textbook authors, widely sought freelance editorialists, and the like. You’re never going to earn a significant amount as an author of philosophy books unless you’re someone like Bertrand Russell who churned out works that struck a public nerve. (Russell is selling heavily even to this day.)

We don’t write philosophy books for financial benefit, except in the sense that writing philosophy books can at a certain stage get you tenure and promotion, which means long-term employment at a higher salary than before. Otherwise, “none but a fool ever wrote philosophy books for money.”