,
10 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
1/ Excited to release a new paper with @ReimersImke looking at the effects of book digitization on the demand for physical copies. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 
The basic motivation for our work is summarized well by this article from @jsumers theatlantic.com/technology/arc… -- Even though we know have the technology, why isnt there a digital library of Alexandria? One place for all knowledge?
3/ One common roadblock? publishers unwilling to digitized their work for the fear the digital distribution will harm demand for physical copies. But are these substitution fears real? Or can digitization help you discover books and *increase* demand? We investigate this Q.
4/ We provide a simple framework to think about this issue. For very popular books, digitization is likely to substitute demand, but for less popular books, digitization might lower search costs and *increase* demand.
5/ What's more, we used a cool natural experiment to find evidence for such a "discovery" effect. We got proprietary data from Harvard on the digitization of their books by the @googlebooks project. It takes ~FIVE years & order of digitization is quasi-random. Diff-in-diff time!
6/ Our main results are simply communicated by this figure. Digitization lowers checkouts within the library, but in the general market, digitization INCREASES sales! No cannibalization y'all!
7/ There is another way to look at this: Harvard did not digitize any books published after 1923. So you can exploit this cutoff to examine how digitization changes outcomes. Same thing -- less loans, but MORE sales.
8/ When we look closely, most of these new sales are driven by less popular books. For popular books -- there is a real cannibalization effect, but only for the very small sliver of the very top.
9/ So what's the takeaway? Fears about cannibalization by publishers and authors from digitization might be overblown. Digital availability might actually *increase* sales for most books through the discovery channel.
10/ Real implications for projects such as @hathitrust and @internetarchive who are doing so much to increase digital knowledge and yet sometimes face the ire of publishers. Need to reopen the discussion about digitizing the sum of human knowledge!
