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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
So what is the answer?
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Cheap (as in, most people agree this is a reasonable price), accessible, convenient content is a big part of it.
Any technology shift changes how and which artists get paid. A hundred years ago, singers who could put on a great public performance often got paid more than those with excellent vocal skills. Fifty years ago, it was the opposite; recorded music doesn't care how well you move on a stage.
The criteria for "financially successful author" is shifting away from "author with contract with a publishing house;" that's not un-successful, but there are other models.
And the end result is never going to be, "everyone who produces terrific art makes a living at it." There have always been authors who couldn't get published, or whose published works languished during their lives. There have always been genius painters who couldn't sell their works. There have always been poets who could make people weep, who wrote their verses on the backs of accounting notebooks and nobody read them until twenty years after their death. Adding the internet & free instant copies to the world doesn't find those people, doesn't connect them to the audience that would happily pay them well. There has always been more art than payment-for-art, and with the internet turning everyone into potential artists, that's even more obvious now.
I don't know what answers will be discovered. I know that humanity likes art, and so we'll find a way to support it, but the transition between limited distribution (based on resource limitations) and instant-infinite distribution is probably going to be painful to a whole lot of people.
For the time being, the Konrath Method is probably what works best: low prices, no DRM, snappy covers & blurbs, wide distribution, and don't fret the copies that don't sell. This method may not work forever, but it's likely to be useful for the next decade at least.
The fingerprint method? WILL NOT WORK. Not because "people won't put up with it"--as you mentioned, a lot of people will put up with a lot of ridiculous "security" measures. But a portion of the people won't put up with it, and such things can only work if *all* content has to go through them. If the fingerprint ebook readers still read non-fingerprinted content, there'll be plenty of demand for piracy.
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The fingerprint data is combined with the file to create on-the-spot a hybrid data/encryption file that is sent directly to your device.
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So... you have to have a scanner connected when you buy the book, or download the activated version of it. And the "fingerprint code" is embedded in the ebook itself, which means you can't convert it to your filetype of choice, just whatever filetypes (1) support fingerprint encoding and (2) are licensed by the software the ebook store uses.