Free Speech

Rather than publishing the books himself, Coelho is harnessing his sizable community of Net-savvy fans, who scan copies of his books and put them up for download. Although the copyright for the translations belongs to the various publishing houses he works with, Coelho owns all of the digital rights to his work, except for his contract for English editions with HarperCollins. Since his surprise at the conference on Jan. 20, Coelho has yet to hear from the publisher. "So far no reaction," Coelho says.

What happens next may be up to the publishers. They could act to limit the free distribution of copyrighted work online by offering only certain chapters for free, or by affixing online copies with digital rights management software that keeps people who have purchased a book for a mobile device from sharing it with friends. Amazon affixed DRM to its digital books for download after introducing its eBook reader, Kindle, in the fall. "There could be an attempt to achieve greater control over readers than publishers or authors have ever attempted before," says James Boyle, an intellectual property law professor at Duke University and an author.

Some publishers have already chosen to jump on the bandwagon of free downloads. Yale University Press has agreed to put Boyle's upcoming book "The Public Doman" online for free. Yale agreed to the move following the success of another one of its authors, Yochai Benkler, whose book "The Wealth of Networks" became a top academic seller even though it has always been available for free online, says Boyle. The science fiction publisher Baen has a free library online that offers its older titles for free download. "I see there's an element of hesitation, of fear, and often it takes just dipping your foot into the water," he says.

Whether or not digital delivery cannibalizes print is an open question, but Coelho doesn't think publishers should worry. For all the hype, there are limits to readers' appetites for online books. A collection of short stories Coelho wrote specifically for the Internet in 2000 was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, but not a single reader took up his invitation to comment on it. Readers only began writing in when some of the stories appeared, six years later, in the book "Like a Flowing River," which sold 180,000 copies in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking territories. "It was a book I didn't expect to sell," he says. "But the people were waiting for it to appear as an official book." Books, he insists, are "a technology that has been developed over 500 and 600 years," he said. "And it's working very well."

© 2008