Why give away your work for free?

“Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’’t lost any sales, I’’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales.

How to Build a Better Digital Book

Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired magazine, has called them “books we watch or television we read.”

.. The Schugars’ research has found that students tend to spend more time reading enhanced books, but that they often comprehend less of the material.

.. he duo recommend an app of Judy Sierra and Marc Brown’s Wild About Books, in which readers touch the word “stampede,” for instance, and trigger a stampede of animals across the page. “For a child who is reading that book, ‘stampede’ may or may not be in their vocabulary,” Heather Schugar said. “So it visually shows them—it helps them make that inference.”