I took a look at the Goodreads data. Unfortunately it’s pretty messy and I don’t think it’ll be much help in understanding the popularity of the new book. Goodreads does distinguish between the different editions, but it’s clear from reading the reviews that some people are reviewing the old book but talking about the new one. And the interface won’t let me see total reviews across all copies by year, so we can’t see if that number has spiked.
Looking past the Goodreads data, I think it’s safe to say that the launch of the new edition was a success. TLYCS is on a much improved growth trajectory (including moving a record $18.2 million in 2020), new donors are telling us that they found us through the book (more so than prior to the relaunch), other organizations like GWWC are also seeing improvements they can trace to the book, etc. Some of this is discussed in TLYCS’s 2020 annual report, which just came out.
Of course some of this impact is because we released a new book, but I’m very confident that it helped a lot to make it free. It’s hard to believe that some people contributing impact weren’t enticed by the free offer and/or would have been put off by a financial cost. “Read this book” is an easier pitch than “buy this book.”
Owning the rights also gives us a lot of flexibility we wouldn’t have if we went the normal publishing route. We can do whatever we want in terms of cutting up the content into pieces to distribute via various channels, we can do translations on our own schedule, making future updates/additions to the ebook, etc.
My take is that owning the rights to foundational books or other IP has a lot of potential for EA. And for anyone considering this I’d say the earlier you figure out that you’ll be giving the book away for free the better, as you’ll need to have a distribution plan and may want to shape some of the content accordingly.
As it happens, I did a quick-and-dirty version of this analysis yesterday—see this spreadsheet. It looks to me like Goodreads is actually helpfully aggregating ratings/reviews across editions (if you click on any one of the editions here, it shows you the same figures), and the rate at which the aggregate numbers have been going up seems to have increased meaningfully since the relaunch, which does seem to provide additional (encouraging!) evidence regarding its impact.
Good idea, but one issue with donating books to a library is that the librarian still has to decide whether to accept or reject the donation. Most librarians are very selective about what gets included and what gets weeded out of their collection.
Another option is to use the library website and find the “Suggest items for the library” web form. (Search the library catalogue first to see whether the library already holds the item.) If the librarian decides to purchase the book, it is completely funded by the library budget.
You can suggest the format too: print, ebook or both. I would say both because both print and ebook formats have their respective strengths and limitations.
For university libraries, if you mention the course or unit (e.g. ethics, philosophy) that would benefit from the book, it helps the librarian to justify the purchase.
Thanks for doing this, hadn’t thought to use the Wayback machine. Really cool to see the quantitative perspective line up with our qualitative impressions!
One way to do the analysis is to record the number of reviews on different dates using different snapshots in webarchive; my guess is that this is what Matt was doing with his analysis. (EDIT: Just saw that Bastian already did this)
Good idea! Just set myself a reminder to look at this a year from now :)
I’d be very interested in seeing this analysis!
I took a look at the Goodreads data. Unfortunately it’s pretty messy and I don’t think it’ll be much help in understanding the popularity of the new book. Goodreads does distinguish between the different editions, but it’s clear from reading the reviews that some people are reviewing the old book but talking about the new one. And the interface won’t let me see total reviews across all copies by year, so we can’t see if that number has spiked.
Looking past the Goodreads data, I think it’s safe to say that the launch of the new edition was a success. TLYCS is on a much improved growth trajectory (including moving a record $18.2 million in 2020), new donors are telling us that they found us through the book (more so than prior to the relaunch), other organizations like GWWC are also seeing improvements they can trace to the book, etc. Some of this is discussed in TLYCS’s 2020 annual report, which just came out.
Of course some of this impact is because we released a new book, but I’m very confident that it helped a lot to make it free. It’s hard to believe that some people contributing impact weren’t enticed by the free offer and/or would have been put off by a financial cost. “Read this book” is an easier pitch than “buy this book.”
Owning the rights also gives us a lot of flexibility we wouldn’t have if we went the normal publishing route. We can do whatever we want in terms of cutting up the content into pieces to distribute via various channels, we can do translations on our own schedule, making future updates/additions to the ebook, etc.
My take is that owning the rights to foundational books or other IP has a lot of potential for EA. And for anyone considering this I’d say the earlier you figure out that you’ll be giving the book away for free the better, as you’ll need to have a distribution plan and may want to shape some of the content accordingly.
As it happens, I did a quick-and-dirty version of this analysis yesterday—see this spreadsheet. It looks to me like Goodreads is actually helpfully aggregating ratings/reviews across editions (if you click on any one of the editions here, it shows you the same figures), and the rate at which the aggregate numbers have been going up seems to have increased meaningfully since the relaunch, which does seem to provide additional (encouraging!) evidence regarding its impact.
Nice, so we should buy the rights to all the other EA books...
A related idea would be to buy copies of e.g. the precipice for university libraries...
Good idea, but one issue with donating books to a library is that the librarian still has to decide whether to accept or reject the donation. Most librarians are very selective about what gets included and what gets weeded out of their collection.
Another option is to use the library website and find the “Suggest items for the library” web form. (Search the library catalogue first to see whether the library already holds the item.) If the librarian decides to purchase the book, it is completely funded by the library budget.
You can suggest the format too: print, ebook or both. I would say both because both print and ebook formats have their respective strengths and limitations.
For university libraries, if you mention the course or unit (e.g. ethics, philosophy) that would benefit from the book, it helps the librarian to justify the purchase.
Thanks for doing this, hadn’t thought to use the Wayback machine. Really cool to see the quantitative perspective line up with our qualitative impressions!
You can get more granular data on the number of ratings (but not reviews) from this page.
One way to do the analysis is to record the number of reviews on different dates using different snapshots in webarchive; my guess is that this is what Matt was doing with his analysis. (EDIT: Just saw that Bastian already did this)