Late Thursday morning, Simba’s Michael Norris introduced “Giving it Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense And When They Don’t” by citing, as all ebook-related panels seem to these days, with some statistics. According to a survey Simba recently published about ebook buying and reading habits, 8% of the US adult population bought at least one book in 2008 – but 15% of them said they had read an ebook. Discrepancies between what people buy and read are common, but for the purposes of this panel, it was a natural segue to talk of whether giving books away for free online […]