Small Beer Offers Free Downloads of New Collection

By Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 4/18/2008 9:00:00 AM

Large houses may have e-book widgets to replicate the experience of browsing a book, but Small Beer Press in Easthampton, Mass., is encouraging its authors to let potential book buyers download the entire book for free.

Through a licensing agreement with Creative Commons, Small Beer made John Kessel’s newly published collection of short stories, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories, available in a variety of formats (low-res PDF, HTML, RTF and text file) earlier this week on its Web site. “We encourage any and all conversions into other formats,” says Small Beer cofounder Gavin Grant. “I see it as the equivalent of it being in a library.” The first day it was available, Small Beer had 1,000 downloads and, as of Thursday, 4,500 downloads, according to Grant.

For his part, Kessel says that he was eager to experiment after a friend, James Patrick Kelly, did something similar for his novella Burn, which subsequently won a Nebula Award. “The people who know and like my work—the ones who have anticipated the book’s publication and been looking forward to it—are pretty likely to buy a copy of the physical book anyway,” he says. “But allowing free downloading will, I hope, help the stories reach people who would never seek out the collection in a bookstore. The Baum Plan, along with a number of his earlier books, can also be downloaded from his Web site.

This is the second book that Small Beer has made available gratis in digital format. In 2005, the press posted cofounder Kelly Link’s collection Stranger Things Happen, which has been downloaded more than 50,000 times.