[bingle]

Originally Posted by NatCh

That's a good point, bingle, but how much of that content would you consider paying for? Would the average person consider paying for? I know there's some worth it, but the vast majority, while interesting/entertaining, simply isn't of a grade that most folks would pay for. And that little bit that is, is kind of viewed as not worth paying for because it's all mixed in with the other. Ad revenue is about the only way to make an approach like that pay, and no one's developed an approach on that that works very well for books.

Sure. But my point is that, currently, I don't *have* to pay for it. A lot of people seem to be doing it just for fun, or for ad revenue, or because they happened to be there with a video camera when the dog caught fire. To me, it's not about whether the creator is getting paid, but whether they're creating. If someone is happy to create for free, (as I am, on many occasions!) then more power to them.

Originally Posted by NatCh

Trouble with that is that at some point revenue for the work still has to be collected, so that doesn't really change things much, just shifts it so that this notional "employer" would be more in control of the process, they'd still want their purchased rights to the content protected.

Yeah, this is a good point. I should have been clearer about this. The software I write is mostly to add value to hardware. I'm sure my company protects it, and would be unhappy if I put it up on BitTorrent, but the fact of the matter is, it wouldn't really hurt them. It doesn't make any difference because they're not making their money off copies of the software.

A surprising amount of software is done this way - it's written not because someone is going to make money off of selling copies of it, but because it's needed for some hardware, or because someone needs software that does something specific, that doesn't exist yet. They don't care about exclusive access, just that the software exists.

I admit I'm having trouble figuring out how this would map to fiction books. But I'm really just trying to throw out ideas for *possible* business models besides "write the work for free, sell the copies".

Originally Posted by NatCh

The first thing that comes to mind on this idea is that there's a reason that the patronage model passed out of common practice. Most likely a lack of patrons, at a guess. The multi-patronage model may work, but there are some serious challenges to overcome, and again, I think it just rearranges the paradigm, rather than shifting it -- instead of the readers paying royalties through the pubs, they're doing it directly, presumably things like copy-editing turn into a contract service that the authors use or don't as they choose.

Yeah, there are a number of other problems with this model, too. One is that patronized artists generally painted portraits of their patron, or composed symphonies in his honor, or whatever. I'm not sure "Tom Clancy's Bill Gates - Billionaire Sniper Squadron" would be a great work of art.

EDIT: Oh, however... I don't know if you've attended a classical music concert recently or not, but most of those seem to run basically on the patronage model. They charge ticket fees, obviously, but every second thing is paid for by some generous grant from some rich family or corporation. So there's a possibility. "Funding for _Revenge of the Octopus Galaxy_ generously provided by the McClosky family".

Originally Posted by NatCh

Yes, well Mr. Doctorow is a very unusual animal, I should thing that very few individuals (out of many quite good writers) could make that approach work for them.

Yes, this is true, sadly. And strangely, part of his success with alternate business models comes *because* he's trying alternate business models. It won't be as interesting to hear someone talk about giving their books away for free when everyone does it.

Originally Posted by NatCh

I'm afraid that both my first and most considered response to this is the sound made by sticking out one's tongue and blowing forcefully. That's kinda my reaction to most suggestions that the gubmint should solve things for us. I just don't see that there are too many things that are worth the bloat, waste and corruption that come from letting the gubmint "help" us. But that's another kettle of fish for another type of forum (the type I generally stay far away from, actually), so I'll leave it at that.

You have some good points, but theoretically, at least, we give the government money so that they can spend it for the good of society. Books are for the good of society, so....

Although of course, there are major problems with this possibility, as well. I'm not sure "Naked Lunch" or "Lady Chatterly's Lover" could have been written as government-sponsored books.

Originally Posted by NatCh

I suppose that the market will likely sort it out, but I'd love to come up with the magic bullet that gets the process moving in a good direction without a huge amount of growing pains. That being said, I freely admit that I have no idea what that answer would be.

Yeah, that would be nice, but I suspect it has to be an organic thing. People will want to write, and they'll want to make money doing it, and they'll find a way they can do that. The only way the solution can arise is from a motivated individual like that - a top-down approach probably won't succeed.

Originally Posted by NatCh

Logically, all the past approaches were abandoned because they didn't work in some wise, and the current ones need to be left behind because they don't really work all that well either (though they do seem to work better than most of the previous approaches, whatever warts the have, and they do have them).

Yeah. The problem is that the world keeps changing, and business models have to change to keep up. I wonder what the artists did when all the patrons went away? Did they end up doing the equivalent of flipping burgers, and how many artists did we lose? It would have been a shame had society tried to fix the problem by punishing art museums, or something, though.

Originally Posted by NatCh

I wonder if the question will be definitively resolved in our lifetimes? If it ever will be resolved?

Given Internet speed, I think this particular problem will be somewhat resolved in our lifetimes. Since a new problem will arise soon enough, though, we'll be struggling with new questions all the time... (See the fact that 3D desktop printers are becoming cheap enough and good enough for homes to start producing their own simple plastic goods... That's going to be another storm brewing, right there).

Originally Posted by NatCh

One thing I do believe is true, and it's been said around here by others: we, as a culture, and as a collection of cultures, need to change our way of thinking on the point of paying for stuff that can be easily copied. It's one thing to take things for free that are explicitly given away, it's another to take them when they're not. I think that's why we see less shareware than we used to (another tangent, that). You and I, and most of our fellow MobileReaders grok that point, but until the majority of the human race accepts and believes in its collective bones that intellectual property should be paid for just like anything else, we'll have copyright issues, and things like DRM plaguing us.

See, I'm not convinced. I think the tide is such that information *will* be free, one way or another, and rather than trying to force people to pay for it directly, we need to find a new way to encourage authorship. The fact of the matter is, people are too shortsighted to do things like pay for a movie in order to keep the studio around in a few years, when they can get the film for free, now. It just won't ever happen. In the face of that, the studio needs to make the hard decisions about how they're going to keep alive while people distribute their movie for free.