Just got back from the Baen site. You're right, they do have a free library of e-books. But you don't see Greg Benford, or Robert Silverberg, or many other authors there. What you find there are books that have, more or less, lost their revenue stream. They aren't making any money anyway, is what I'm saying. I couldn't find a single book in the free library that had an Amazon ranking above 109,000, and most were over 200,000. (to be fair, I only check six, randomly) That's effectively, no sales. I'm friends with a couple of the "free" authors, so I'll ask them what their say was in going free. I suspect that it was that or let the book go out of print. Faced with the same question, I'd give my books away, too, hoping they'd motivate people to buy my "in print" books.

While Prince or Motorhead might be able to sell their work directly to the public, bypassing publishers and distribution networks, most artists and authors function in a much smaller world. As I stated before, musicians, who were, at one time, recording artists who performed to sell recordings, changed their income source to performance and selling merchandise at performances to make their living. Authors can't do that. And unlike film, we don't have Box Office, a limited content delivery system, to offset the losses from copying.

Heartburnkid asks about inheiritance of digital media. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with a secondary market -- with people selling one copy of a digital book to a used book store, or
leaving it to their kids. DRM pisses me off, too. Every time I want to rip a Sony or Columbia DVD so I can watch it on my Iphone I'm irritated by DRM. Yes, I've paid for the DVD, but now I can't watch it on the machine I choose? So I get that part.(I'm sure there are tools out there to foil the Sony DRM, but I don't have them.)

I don't stand outside of the library yelling at people who take my books out. And I think the DMCA is deeply flawed, so I'm not some shill for "the man".

If as some of you suggest, that authors don't deserved to be paid for their work, then so be it. I'll go back to waiting tables, but the quality and availability of the books you have to choose from is going to suffer in the long run. Maybe that, too, is inevitable. The latest best-sellers in Japan are written on cell phones, in text-speak. Maybe books will die out as an art form. So be it. I'm only saying that it worries me because in the mean time, I have to pay my bills, and if the shift in revenue models comes as quickly as it did in music, I'm going to be standing in line for soup with a lot of my writer friends. Just a point of view as a creator and a consumer of content.

There's not that many of us. It probably won't really have an effect on anyone else.

When MP3 downloading took the profit out of selling recorded music, bands changed their revenue model to performance. What used to be a long commercial to sell the record, now is the main source of income for performers. Authors can't charge $60.00 and up per ticket for performance. All of our income is based on royalties, which is based on sales. We accept that people will borrow books, will get them at the library, and will sell them back to used book stores, and that is built into the business model, but I'm a little worried about a time when books can be peer-to-peered the way music is. I think a lot of authors are going to have to go back to waiting tables for a living.

(Please, please, please, don't bring up Cory Doctorow. He doesn't make a living on his novels. He is not representative of most professional writers.)

For those of us who make our living on this, I think it would be better for Amazon and Sony to change the "term" for electronic books. Yes, you rent them. You can keep them as long as you'd like, but you rent them. Like Amazon Unbox, say. I have the movie on my Tivo or computer, but I have limited use of it. The average e-book of my novels costs $9.99. The hardcover usually goes for $24.00, the paperback $14.00. So there is a discount for the cost reduction in production and distribution -- maybe there can be a limit to use as well. It's all how you look at it.

Oh hell, nevermind. Would you like rice or baked potato with your steak?

Christopher Moore

Dude, you are defending the Spanish Inquisition as being the "best holy inquisition, ever!" You realize that, right?

Quick, which was the most revolutionary genocide, you nitwit?

I thought I'd trade in my Thinkpad X-40 for a Mac ultra-light, but I guess I'll have to wait for a smaller Macbook. (I don't take my 13 in MacBook on trips because it's just too heavy and the battery life is crap.)

Once again, Apple chooses form over function. It steams my nads.

Hey Steve, how about announcing things like: "Oh, the shit we released last year? We actually got it to work this year. You can copy and paste on your IPHONE. You can synch your Idisk under Leopard. AND our software doesn't freak out if you don't let it organize your life the way we like it organized."

Too much to ask?