Paying to get something is a lot more motivating than paying for something you already have and are under no risk of losing. The idea of people paying you out of pure gratitude is probably the most attractive, guilt-free, inarguably nice method around for getting paid. Unfortunately, I've never seen it work not-terribly.
Even just putting the book behind a pay-what-you-want wall that allows $0 but defaults to $5 would probably significantly increase the number of payers. It's not even about people's greed or ability/desire to pay. It's about their laziness. Can you imagine how terribly the Humble Bundle would perform if they had you download all of the games immediately for free then asked you to remember to come back and pay for them later? The entire revenue plan for the Bundle organizers themselves rests on including themselves in the revenue split by default knowing that most people will be too lazy to even spend brain cycles thinking about what they personally think should be the proper split. The customers just look at the fairly reasonable default and go "Um, sure. Whatever. Here's my money. Can I get the stuff now?"
Paying to get something is a lot more motivating than paying for something you already have and are under no risk of losing. The idea of people paying you out of pure gratitude is probably the most attractive, guilt-free, inarguably nice method around for getting paid. Unfortunately, I've never seen it work not-terribly.
Even just putting the book behind a pay-what-you-want wall that allows $0 but defaults to $5 would probably significantly increase the number of payers. It's not even about people's greed or ability/desire to pay. It's about their laziness. Can you imagine how terribly the Humble Bundle would perform if they had you download all of the games immediately for free then asked you to remember to come back and pay for them later? The entire revenue plan for the Bundle organizers themselves rests on including themselves in the revenue split by default knowing that most people will be too lazy to even spend brain cycles thinking about what they personally think should be the proper split. The customers just look at the fairly reasonable default and go "Um, sure. Whatever. Here's my money. Can I get the stuff now?"