I went to the video store with my fifteen-year-old son yesterday, where we ran into the latest version of free samples. We’re already pretty excited about the debut of True Blood on HBO, since it was created by Alan Ball, whose Six Feet Under was a favorite in our house. And we were planning to watch its debut on September 7. But why wait? There on the shelves of our local Blockbuster was Episode One–ahead of the broadcast! And not only that, when we went to rent it we were told it was free of charge this week.

The old ideas about broadcast “windows” are clearly falling fast. In a recent article about an upcoming collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno, they announced their plan to offer the album as a digital download before making it available as a disc. In another interesting move, the Obama campaign had the New York Times print his Democratic National Convention speech on their website about 15 hours before he spoke live.

Book publishers are beginning to experiment with new approaches as well–and why not? If giving a book away for free–or at least a portion of it–helps interest readers in a book, then we’ve achieved an increasingly difficult goal. Must a paperback always follow a hardcover by a year? Must an electronic book be released at the same time as the hardcover? We need to find ways to avoid pitting one retailer against another while at the same time keeping our eyes on the prize: getting people to hear about the books we publish, and possibly even read one–in some form or another, sometime!

Bob