What makes all this robust sales activity notable (aside from public interest in its content) is that millions more people accessed the 142-page report gratis from all the Web sites where it was posted. In the first day, the U.S. Institute of Peace, said it alone had 730,000 downloads. The process was instantaneous and the layout exactly the same as in the book that carries retail price of $10.95.

As a practical matter with direct bearing on the media business, this is the latest example of what I suppose can be called variable pricing. People will still pay for what they could get for free, based on convenience, habit, durability, and impulse. And the results can be lucrative.

This phenomenon first became clear to me in 1998 when PublicAffairs published the Starr Report (our national concerns in those days seem embarrassingly frivolous in retrospect). Downloading was still in its earliest stages, but major newspapers ran the full text on the morning after its release. The Washington Post cost $0.25 at that time. Our book, which arrived in stores seventy-two hours after it became available, was retailed at $10.00. We shipped about 500,000 copies, sold about half in the next three weeks, and made a tidy profit, even after sharing revenue with the Washington Post, which had given us the disc of the report and its stories from the first day to include in our book. Two other commercial versions were published, and we all went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Newspapers no longer run these texts because the extra newsprint required is a gratuitous expense. Moreover, since 1998, the ease of making information available on the Web in all kinds of ways has advanced dramatically. There is now a virtually seamless interaction between text, streaming commentary on news organization Web sites, and blogging, which didn’t even exist as a concept in 1998. And yet, nearly everyone still refers to the Iraq Study Group Report as a “book.” It is the book that was presented to President Bush by the panel, the book that was photographed on front pages and visible everywhere as the physical manifestation of the Iraq Study Group’s work. If I were at Vintage, I’d be thrilled.

Here’s how the publisher was chosen: About a month ago, the Iraq Study Group staff approached, we were told, four publishers, including PublicAffairs. We did a proposal touting our experience with books of this kind, our flexibility and speed. We suggested a price of $10, based on what we were told was a document of under 100 pages. The actual report is 96 pages and the rest are lists and other appendices to beef it up to 142 pages. Vintage was chosen, according to a commission member, primarily because it promised to print the largest number of copies. PublicAffairs said its first printing would be 75,000. As a division of Random House, Vintage could afford to make a much larger speculative bet on the report’s salability than we could. The cost of paper and overnight shipping meant that publishing the Iraq Study Group Report without knowing its contents was a consequential business bet. Vintage did a marvelous job, although first day distribution was ragged.

On the evening before the report was released, a rumor swept the Washington Post that the New York Times had acquired an early copy of the book and would scoop the commission. This was what happened on the eve of the release of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III and symbolized the report’s arrival into the center ring of media buzz and the risks of offering it for sale. A New York Times story did not appear, and the commission’s strategy for gaining maximum visibility, availability, and excitement over its findings was validated. But there is only one reader whose opinion of The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward—A New Approach really matters. In a sense, the epilogue of this bestseller gets to be written by the president.

Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos’ columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.