@jindra @whatanerd @hakan_geijer
That said, the evidence as such is more or less that in a space where books sell 50-800 copies, if you put the book online for free, often that immediately removes the majority of the buyers who are only going to pick it up on a lark in hopes of eventually reading it, without actually reading it.
This flips in the other direction when a book is such that it is able to build attention and importance via distribution.