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Originally Posted by stonetools
Whats interesting is that Elfwreck is dead set against the idea of ad-supported ebooks , even as he supports a status quo that leads inexorably towards this as the most likely solution adopted.
Of course, there may not be much difference between "The Truth about Global Warming" , financed by Exxon, and advertising by Exxon, really.
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I'm not against ad-supported ebooks. I insist that ads *in* ebooks is a doomed idea; it can't provide enough return to advertisers to be a useful market strategy.
I don't think Kickstarter will replace publishers, but I suspect it, and things like it, will fill a niche publishers have been avoiding: limited-interest high-expense projects. And that'll expand to wider-interest lower-expense projects, because crowdsourced funding for their pet projects is something lots of people will participate in.
The crowdsourcing also cuts down on the patrons being able to shape the final product--which is something a lot of patrons would prefer.
Note that I'm not suggesting kickstarter be used to fund pharmaceutical research; I'm suggesting it could be used to get Book 5 Of The Series written, or a biography of Famous Person Who Left Few Notes.
Saying that this kind of funding *needs* to go through a major publisher with the current system--advances followed by tiny royalties in the distant future, with the author locked into a long-term contract--is saying that legacy publishing is the only way that quality writing ever gets to the public.
And while yes, I have no specific plan in mind--this isn't like the alternate energy debates wherein people who say "we will find a way!" are counting on blind hope. This is a case where the elements of success: interest, money, information, writing skill--are all present; all that's left is the coordination necessary to bring them together in a way that produces books. Since we have the parts, and the desire for this to happen, this is a sociological problem, not a technological one.
We aren't going to run out of writers. Nor out of people willing to pay for quality writing. A shift in market strategies may (will) involve a shift in what kinds of books are likely to be widely published--but they won't be lower in quality than what we've had in the past. Excellent literature & nonfic is still being written, and disseminated more widely than it was in the past.
The fact that the mountain of mediocre and just plain craptastic works is 10x larger than it used to be doesn't change the number of great works available. And I'm comfortable ignoring any complaint based on "I can't find the good stuff!" Ebooks don't take up shelf space; they're not squeezing the good books off the shelves. Finding the good stuff has *always* been a problem. Now there's plenty of good stuff to find.