I was looking for a book about allergies and looking on Amazon I found "allergy and asthma cure" from Fred Pescatore. Looking online for a better price I discovered that theLog In! Why do people make these books free, do you have an idea?
Sometimes I think they just have them free for a while so that you can read it and recommend it to your friends and then they end up buying it. It is good advertising.
Some writers make their books free to bump up online figures for a certain time, so they can they announce in publicity how successful the book has been. Others use creative commons and allow the book to be downloaded in a certain format for non commercial use. This is for self-help and educational books usually. There are other ways writers do this as a promotion, to give away a free book just before the launch of a new one.
Sometimes the free pdfs posted online are uploaded by people who bought the book, or got it from some file sharing site. So a book can be uploaded online legitimately by the writer or by others who don't care much about the writer or what they won't earn from the book they post online. However should anyone come across such a book, it's always better to download without asking questions — clear conscience for those who hate piracy.
One of the reasons the books are available for free is that the books are not getting sold to a great extent. By keeping some of the books for free, the authors are trying to publicize the books. Once they get enough number of buyers, I am sure they will definitely keep a price for it. It all depends on how popular the book is among different kinds of people. The more the popularity, more will be the price.
I think that the author should make the first series of a long, multiple series book free. This is so that we can actually see if we like the story or not before spending so much money as well as more people can now read the book, which increases potential future sales and that if people find this book good, the more people would know about it. I think some of the less popular series are doing this now so sometimes you can find free PDFs on a book.
In the case I mention, I think the guy really makes money with the people that go to his office, so he made the book free to make people go to his practice. On the other hand it might just be goodness of his heart, I mean, he might just want to help people and in fact, I am loving the book.