Matt Mason Releases “The Pirate's Dilemma” Free of Charge

Matt Mason, whose The Pirate's Dilemma book we presented in a previous report, has made available a PDF copy of his book on is website Thepiratesdilemma.com.

The author has tested online publishing the same way Radiohead has tried out launching its music on the Internet; Mason let users be the ones that decide the price for each download – and the thing is it can even be …no price at all. According to him, charging nothing for the book it may actually lead to an increase of the number of copies sold:

"There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. (…) By treating the electronic version of a book as information rather than property, and circulating it as widely as possible, many authors such as Paulo Coelho and Cory Doctorow actually end up selling more copies of the physical version."

Compared to Doctorow, however, Mason’s release doesn’t meet the terms of a Creative Commons license, which means that sharing the copy would make you a copyright infringer. Yet, this doesn’t look like something Mason would be too concerned with. The author even receives the fact of being pirated as appositive aspect:

"Pirate copies of The Pirate’s Dilemma are out there online anyway, and they don’t seem to have harmed sales. My guess is they are helping. To be honest, I was flattered that the book got pirated in the first place."