<div>One of my favorite users of CC-BY is Pratham Books in India.</div>


<div>Pratham Books is a non-profit trust that publishes high quality books
for children at affordable prices and in multiple Indian languages.
They’ve shipped more than 7,000,000 books.</div>


<div>They’ve got a
beautiful
post about their move from the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
(BY-NC-SA) CC license to the Attribution (BY) only license and the
internal back story of the decision. What’s really fascinating isn’t
just that they relicensed 400 books under BY, but that they only managed
to post 173 of those books online at Scribd. The other 227 books were
not posted. So we have a nice, natural study to analyze of the
differences between openly licensed content that is in a stable, well
used platform and content that isn’t.</div>


<div>Some brief takeaways. Read their whole post to see the graphs.</div>


<ol>
<li> 

The sales of individual books available on Scribd don’t differ greatly
than those that aren’t  - but they’re definitely not significantly
lower.
</li>
<li> 

Cumulatively, the sales of Pratham books on Scribd appear to outsell
those that don’t, though not totally outside the error margins. But
again, they’re not lower.
</li>
<li> 

For cumulative sales data for CC books that were available on Scribd
vs. CC books that were not available on Scribd, the former outsold the
latter in almost a 3:1 ratio.
</li>
</ol>\tightlist


<div>Let’s unpack point #3, because it’s fascinating. These are books that
are available online, under the most liberal license offered by Creative
Commons. You can one-click download and print them, or even send them
off to be reprinted and sell them yourself. Yet the ones that are there
radically outsell those (also liberally licensed books) that are in a
more controlled technical environment.</div>


<div>There’s a lot of money spent looking for ways to sell books and content
on the web, to protect authors, to protect old revenue sources.
Sometimes though, the best advertising for the content (and implicitly
the author) is the content itself. And there is mounting evidence that
at least some people will pay for the authentic version, whether it’s to
get the physical artifact, to help the author, or simply because they
want to.</div>


<div>This is a tiny data point. What’d be great is if as these experiments
happen, more publishers started to release the data as to the outcomes.
We live in a world where we can’t even get a publisher to tell us the
breakdowns in their revenues, how much they make off subscriptions and
new content versus access to the back catalog. Data about where the
money and the sales actually happen will drive far better policy than we
have. If only the publishers would get that and start opening up some
channels.</div>