Comments on: [publishing] Yet another dip into ebooks and licensing

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:50:19 +0000

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This post was mentioned on Twitter by NSAuthors: Jay Lake: [publishing] Yet another dip into ebooks and licensing: A long post of my own in response to a very thou… http://bit.ly/bOq6Db...

By: Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:08:56 +0000

Bob, I wish I had the time/energy to resurrect Ozymandias. Actully, no, I just someone else would do all the work

Jay, I hear and feel for you on the ‘tough cookies’ thing. Sigh.

By: Stephen Watkins

Stephen Watkins — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:10:16 +0000

I don’t know, it sounds like a lousy one, in general.

I was going to say more, but frankly no matter what examples I cited or what scenarios I imagined, it would still be just a lousy future.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:08:51 +0000

But then, who does? What new stories are there to tell? Has any author really created an entirely new character, unlike any previous character?

Therein lies 10,000 comment blog post, methinks.

By: Kai Jones

Kai Jones — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:05:43 +0000

It’s hardly in my best interests, either, given that my husband was laid off a year ago and has spent the intervening time trying to sell his fiction, unable to find a job like his old one.

I read and enjoy a lot of fanfic. I even print it off and put it into binders. Some of it is much better written than the worst of the books I buy and read for pleasure (or try to read for pleasure, anyway). They just don’t start with original characters and setting.

But then, who does? What new stories are there to tell? Has any author really created an entirely new character, unlike any previous character? You file off the serial numbers and write your version, hoping to add enough value to get my beer money (as Heinlein would put it).

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:57:15 +0000

people creating content for others to consume, doing it out of love of the community or subject rather than any expectation of compensation.

That may well be the future of publishing, and it might even be the right one; but it’s a lousy future for me personally from a purely financial perspective. Which, as points out on the LiveJournal side of my blog, may just be my tough cookies. Sigh.

By: Bob Kruger

Bob Kruger — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:26:35 +0000

I don’t know about a book as a license, but I can conceive of an _eBook_ as a license, where my holding the license entitles me to that book in any format at all participating retailers. A powerful author cooperative might be able to create an eBook-publishing entity that maintains a license directory and supplies the various .com retailers with content, on condition that they honor free or cheap download service on licenses they didn’t sell. ISBNs for eBooks are in a messy state, and we need a new entity to address the problem, one that does more than universally identify titles.

I could also envision cooperatives that supply their members with a reputation score that helps determine the exposure their work gets.

I’m not saying this is the future of book vetting and promotion on the Web, but it could be. And something equally novel probably will be.

By: Kai Jones

Kai Jones — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:46:56 +0000

Painters paint copies of famous art in museums. They can even sell those copies. The Grateful Dead encouraged circulation *and* sale of fan-produced recordings of their concerts. Their business model is reported in The Atlantic. BoingBoing says Free ebooks correlate with increased print-book sales. On your LJ there's a discussion of fanfic. I'd point to fan-run conventions as a similar model: people creating content for others to consume, doing it out of love of the community or subject rather than any expectation of compensation.

By: Cora

Cora — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:51:54 +0000

First of all, there is a problem with the dockworker analogy, because – speaking as someone from a harbour city who knows plenty of people who worked in the harbour since before containerization – it wasn’t so much containerization that massively killed jobs, but it was shipbuilding increasingly moving to the far East that killed shipyard jobs and it was ships getting ever bigger and eventually too big for our harbour that killed off dockworker jobs. However, ships are still being built somewhere, goods are still transported across the sea, vessels must still be unloaded in harbour and that work still involves people. The jobs are different than fifty years ago, but there are still people working in the harbour.

So will writing and publishing for pay disappear completely? I doubt it, simply because the entertainment or content people consume must come from somewhere. Yes, there are plenty of YouTube videos and some of them or fun and well-made, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to watch a Hollywood film sometimes. Yes, there is plenty of free stuff to read on the net and some of it is good, but who would only want to read fanfiction, free original online fiction and public domain classics for the rest of his life? Never mind that fanfiction always requires something for the writers to write about, i.e. content someone originally wrote for money.

By: Stephen Watkins

Stephen Watkins — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:09:26 +0000

That was a particularly cogent reply.