Torture Report A Best Seller On Kindle, Despite Being Available For Free (And In The Public Domain) | Techdirt

"'You can't compete with free!' is the mantra of a number of copyright maximalists -- and no matter how many times we show them examples of people successfully competing with free, it's still taken as inviolable law by some. Yet, here we are with yet another example of it happening anyway. As you know, last week the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released its CIA torture report (or, rather, the redacted version of the executive summary of the full report). It is a gripping read, and you can read the whole thing here (or embedded below). We can post it here for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the document is in the public domain, as a work of the federal government. A little over ten years ago, we noted that the famed 9/11 Commission Report, despite also being in the public domain, had become a best seller in its printed version -- even though it, too, was in the public domain. It appears something similar is happening with the CIA torture report. There is a Kindle version that costs $2.99, and despite the report being available as a PDF (which can be viewed on Kindle), the fee-based version of the torture report is the number one seller in the 'intelligence & espionage' section (beating out James Risen's recent book Pay Any Price). And this is happening despite the fact that people on Amazon are warning people not to buy the fee-based Kindle version, posting comments to tell them it's just a PDF that's available for free. Yet, it appears that the convenience factor has made it worthwhile to an awful lot of people, who are willing to pay the money rather than figure out how to get the PDF onto their kindle. As we've pointed out for years, things like convenience and ease-of-use are real selling points -- and it's why things like Netflix and Spotify have been shown to decrease infringement -- because it's worth paying a little extra for a better-to-use system ..."