They say that if you give something away for free today, you can’t charge for it tomorrow - that you create an expectation that it will always be free. I’m not so sure of this.

About five years ago I began reading the New York Times online. After 9/11, I quickly become immersed in the opinions of Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and their fellow opinion makers. Love them or hate them, they seemed at the time to be the sole voices of dissent in a crazy world. When TimesSelect was introduced a few months ago, and my access to free content was free no more, I grumbled like so many others - but I took out my credit card and paid the money.

I was a junkie. I’d become dependent on ‘the reality-based community,‘ and I couldn’t give it up.

David Webber is a best selling science fiction author. His books about Honor Harrington are often described as Horatio Hornblower in space, and each new volume is an immediate best seller. I discovered him about a year ago after following a link to the Baen Free Library, from where ten of his novels are available to read or download for free.

I began by reading On Basilisk Station, the first volume in the Honor Harrington series. It was a fantastic read, and I wanted more. The problem was, of the seven or eight books in the series, only two were downloadable for free. So I turned to Amazon, and without grumbling this time, paid the money.I’d gotten hooked, and I wanted more.

Kelley Armstrong is another best selling author who treats her fans to freebies with no expectation of future revenues. After buying her first novel, I turned to her web-site to discover three prequel novels set in the same universe, about the same characters. These novels were unedited, but complete works, never published and not available to purchase.

After quickly devouring the free content, I again turned to Amazon and bought the next paperback in the series.

So what is there to learn from all this?

My opinion is that it comes down to how valuable non-paying subscribers or users are. If the product or service you provide is always free, with no prospect of revenue, then you gain nothing by having a thousand or a million users. Both David Weber and Kelley Armstrong however, are building a larger fan base by providing free downloads, and enhancing sales of their other books as a result.

When I released PageFour I knew there was a good chance it would not be a commercially viable product, but I wanted to write it anyway. Over the past few months, referrals from dodgy warez sites, hawking the illegal cracked version of the software have been ten times higher than all other referrals combined.

So, would it be better to have ten thousand people using PageFour for free, or five hundred fully paid and licensed users? I’m honest enough to admit that the thought of ten or a hundred thousand people using and enjoying my software is a huge ego trip, but that doesn’t pay the rent.