I have this seen many a time whilst travelling for work or leasure.
On some airlines you get free news papers (or did, I wouldn’t be able to tell if this is still the case as I travel a lot less nowadays), and on others you don’t.
When the news papers are given away the stand quickly gets emptied of them and when you exit the plane you can see the news papers left on the seats or in places they shouldn’t really be.
I’ve never seen a plane full of paid for news paper after landing, because few people actually buy them, and ever fewer would be throwing them away after a short trip when they bought them.
Now, that’s no study, but you can see why such idea would gain support from day to day experience, and with 0 sscientifical evidences .
Seriously, I suspect that Analayo has some of these issues in mind with his publishing strategy, which gets his books out in the first place as “regular books”, then later as freely distributable.
Though I quite understand that you are not bothered by it, I think that it would be a pity if your new translations were not cited due to silly technicalities, like not being able to find a “real refererence”.
As I am an inveterate free-literature-gatherer, I can attest to the inclination to gather reading material that may never get read. It becomes unavailable for someone who wants it, and the resources used to produce it are wasted.
I’m working diligently to change this behavior.
Just a little not-so-important additional example. There’s a book by Ajahn Brahm that has been printed for free distribution. Not many people have a copy. :(
So, what we are doing now is re-typing the whole book, then we will print a number of copies according to our budget (donations), then we will have the e-book version freely available on our website.
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