The Oprah touch doesn’t just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman’s
"Women & Money" were downloaded after the announcement last week on
Winfrey’s television show that the e-book edition would be available
for free on her Web site for a period of 33 hours.

"I believe `Women & Money’ is the most important book I’ve ever
written," Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. "So
this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to
read it, and that was the intention behind this offer."

The download offer "has built excitement for Suze’s book across all
formats," Julie Grau, the book’s publisher, said in a statement.

According to Saturday’s statement from Winfrey, more than 1.1
million copies of Orman’s financial advice book were downloaded in
English, and another 19,000 in Spanish. The demand compares to such
free online sensations as "The 9-11 Commission Report," which the federal government made available for downloads, and Stephen King’s e-novella, "Riding the Bullet."

The publishing community has endlessly debated the effects of making
text available online, with some saying that free downloading is a
valuable promotional tool and others worrying that sales for paper
editions would be harmed. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers each have sued Google for its plans to scan and index books for the Internet.

The offer for "Women & Money," originally released a year ago by
Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc., has not kept
people from buying the traditional version. As of Saturday, the book
ranked No. 6 on Amazon.com. The paper edition of "The 9-11 Commission Report," published in 2004 by W.W. Norton and Co., was a best seller for months.

"I can tell you that with respect to the `9-11 Report,’ the free
download did not seem to hurt sales at all," Norton publisher Drake
McFeely told The Associated Press on Saturday. "There were people who
wanted it quickly, in a less convenient form, and that was clearly a
different market from the people who wanted the traditional book."

He said free downloading of books does concern publishers, but "if Norton had been given the opportunity for an Oprah Winfrey plug, and part of the deal was making the book free online, we would have gladly taken it."

Via Yahoo