The mantra in the early days of the Internet was that “content wants to be free.” The last decade has added some important qualifiers to that, leading YouTube to pull copyrighted material and some big media providers like The New York Times to swing pendulum-like between paid subscriptions and complete availability.

But HarperCollins Publishers says it has seen strong results from a pilot program that follows that Web-pioneer dictum by throwing selected titles up onto the Internet cover to cover, permitting readers to consume them in toto on their PCs.

Called “Full Access”, the program was intended to test the sales impact of offering time-limited, totally free access to some of its books over the Web. The pilot began in mid-February with five titles chosen by the publisher in cooperation with their authors including a novel from Paul Coelho, “The Witch of Portobello”, and the first entry in the “Warriors” young-adult series from Erin Hunter about a clan of feral cats.

Visitors to www.HarperCollins.com were able to read these “Full Access” books on site. While the site was available to Web-enabled portable devices, readers couldn’t download the content and transfer it to another reader; they had to consumer it via the Web site. (For the free version, that is; HarperCollins offers downloadable e-books for a price.) And they had a clearly defined window of time to do so; the online versions of those books went away a month after they went up on the site.

The “Full Access” idea was an elaboration of HarperCollins.com’s “Browse Inside” feature. Introduced in August 2006, that capability makes about 20% of new titles available on the publisher’s Web site when they first hit the stores. It resembles Amazon’s “Search Inside” app and Google’s “Book Search” feature. And of course it also replicates the way most people sample books in an actual bookstore.

Last February HC elaborated “Browse Inside” with a widget that let readers put browsable content from these new titles onto their personal Web sites, blogs and MySpace pages. Last August the publisher broadened that reach with a widget for perhaps the only mobile device that makes sense: the Apple iPhone. As with the PC version, mobile readers can scan a few chapters of the title and then click through the HarperCollins Web site to the sites of about two dozen online retailers from whom they can buy, including amazon.com. (HarperCollins does not sell its titles directly except as e-books.)

The success of “Browse Inside” in building buzz around new titles led HarperCollins to become curious about what giving complete access might do, says Carolyn Pittis, senior vice president for global marketing strategy and operations at HarperCollins. And while the publisher has yet to reveal correlations between the “Full Access” program and sales, judging by the amount of visitor interaction with the content, the program shows promise for publicizing both new offerings and backlist titles from well-loved authors.

Readers of the “Full Access” titles used their mouse to scroll down through the book in a continuous stream or use buttons to leaf through the book one page at a time. The process is admittedly cumbersome, especially if the books include lots of photos, making it unlikely that any but the most committed fans are going to consume these titles online from front to back.

How did they read? Thanks to the magic of Web tracking, HarperCollins knows. “People generally browsed chronologically through the books from the beginning,” Pittis says of the metrics collected in that first round of offerings in February and March. “They looked at the covers, and the first chapters. You can actually search within the books, and they used that function maybe 3% of the time. And the average depth they read into the titles online was about 35 or 40 pages.”

Some of the titles HarperCollins offered were much more widely read than others, she says, and those big draws skewed the average for all the “Full Access” list. Visitors most commonly read only about 20 pages into the Web-based books.

HarperCollins was also careful to consult with the authors before throwing their books up on the Web in entirety. Some are opposed to offering total access, e-books or even online excerpts as possible temptation to electronic piracy; Pittis points to J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series (and not an HC author) as perhaps the most notable electronic holdout in the industry.

But she said other authors were anxious to test the Internet as a tool for building real-world sales, either for their current titles or for their next efforts. Brazilian writer Coelho’s books published by HarperCollins are now the beneficiary of a year-long promotional campaign that offers complete online access to a different title every month.

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, another HarperCollins bestseller, was so enthusiastic about the “Full Access” pilot that he asked readers of his very popular blog which of his titles they’d most likely recommend to their friends. The answer: “American Gods”, perhaps his most popular title. So “American Gods” went up in the first “Full Access” wave last February, and bookstores sales immediately tripled. Not bad for a title first published in 2001.

Gaiman, who also wrote the “Sandman” series of graphic novels, promoted the free book offer on his Web site and reported on March 15 that the free online “American Gods” had had 54,000 users and received 2.3 million page views, with most users viewing about 42 pages.

A bit earlier in the month, he also responded to some criticism from booksellers who accused him of undercutting their business by permitting free books. Gaiman said focusing on competitive harm ignored the good that could come from expanding brand awareness, in a sense.

“A bookseller who regards a library as the enemy, because people can go there and read—for free!—what he sells, is missing that the library is creating a pool of people who like and take pleasure in books,” Gaiman blogged. “Figures indicate that… people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger. Which means you need to find ways to get young readers to read books. If someone likes ‘American Gods’ and goes out and buys my entire backlist from you, that’s more books than most Americans read in a year.”

For their part, Pittis says HarperCollins is now measuring “everything we can measure” to determine the audience effect of Web-enabling this handful of free titles. (A new group of five titles is now available in “Full Access”, including another Coelho book—and yes, “American Gods” still.) As with the first group, readers can forward links to the free books to their friends.

“We want to gauge how much viral pass-along we’re getting with this campaign,” she says. “Obviously, if the pass-along rates are extremely high, we can do some modeling on the potential sales impact. That will affect our decisions on how much to give away and how.

“Our goal as a publisher of many authors is to have a platform that’s flexible enough to accommodate the ways different authors may want to market. We’re able to really think about new ways to create audiences for books. It’s an exciting marketplace, and everyone’s learning a lot from these different experiments.”