Faber launches 'pay-what-you-want' ebook
Richard Lea writing in the guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 March 2009

Two years after Radiohead's pay-what-you-like album, In Rainbows, the independent UK publisher Faber is launching its own digital experiment, giving readers the chance to pay what they deem appropriate for historian Ben Wilson's latest book, fittingly titled What Price Liberty?

Wilson's examination of the value and meaning of liberty will be available to download on 27 April, six weeks before it is published on paper at £14.99, with readers given the freedom to set their own price, or even download it for free.

It's a strategy Wilson, whose two previous books were published conventionally by Faber as hardbacks, admits is "a gamble". When he first heard about the "frightening idea of giving the book away", his reaction was surprise. "I've published before," he explains, "and you have that excitement of a book in physical form, so that's what you expect". But after a while "it clicked together so well with what I wanted to do with the book – the campaigning edge – that it made a lot of sense."

In the book, Wilson argues that the contemporary assault on civil liberties in the UK follows a decline in the importance and status of ideas of liberty in Britain's national culture, and that it is only through an understanding of history that we can fashion a liberty fit for the 21st century.

The initiative is the latest in a series of moves from publishers around the world to experiment with ebook giveaways. Paulo Coelho and Stephen King have been giving books away online since 2000, and both Hodder and HarperCollins offered titles for free last year, but this is the first time a major publisher has given readers the chance to place their own price on a new title.

Richard Lea's full piece can be read online at the Guardian.