Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
If everything is to be free, what incentive would there be to create new works? As things stand, people are able to create and have their work support themselves and their family. If they had no possibility of income, they would not be able to support themselves and would have to find alternative forms of work. Even if they did it for the pure enjoyment of it, they still would not have the means of sharing it with the world at large, since that still costs plus the companies that would ordinarily be there to provide services to share it would no longer be existing since they couldn't generate profit and couldn't afford to keep running while doing that type of work.
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There are some current experiments dealing with paying for books before the books are written, It could definitely work with popular authors.
As to the collapse of literature if everything is free, it's a concern but I feel that by making everything free, only the best literature would be supported monetarily and therefore promoted. People are willing to pay after reading, whether or not authors will still be able to make billions is irrelevant.
The cost of printing and shipping a printed book is marginal compared to the preproduction costs of a printed book published by one of the big 6, perhaps this means that the production methods of the big 6 are unsustainable in the new era (highly likely).
We are probably going to have to stop thinking about purchasing individual texts and start thinking about purchasing access to a system that contains texts.