[Elfwreck]

[QUOTE=petrucci;2067928]Most bloggers that I am aware of are actually paid for their work. They receive substantial compensation from advertising revenues. [quote]

I know of (not know personally, but know of) several million bloggers at Livejournal and Dreamwidth who don't get advertising revenue from their blogging at those sites. (Nor should they, for the most part; LJ and DW are designed as journals--much more social than most blogging platforms.)

Quote:
I am worried that people will not be able to earn a living writing fiction. I suspect that lack of professional writers will reduce the amount and quality of writing.

Unfortunately, I lack data to support my claims with regard to authors in general. I have given examples from numerous industries, including journalism. My fear is based upon basic principles in economics. I firmly believe that lots of free books of high quality will devalue writing.

And yet the explosion of free ebooks and other content over the last 10 years has made *more* professional authors, not less of them.

The problem you want to fix doesn't exist. Yes, the publishing industries are in utter chaos--but there are *no* signs that this means writing-as-career is in any danger whatsoever. Authors' ability to get paid for their work has only increased as the web has grown, including in a variety of fields that never allowed for payment before.

There are restrictions to donations. A good example would be the restrictions on political campaign donations in the USA.

I don't see how that's an example of "being required to charge for something." Who is being required to take money for something they wanted to offer for free?

Quote:
It would be the goal that the price of books be such that authors are able to make a living from writing.

Here I made an error. I never meant that ALL would-be authors could earn a living from writing. There are certainly lots of people who are not cut out to be writers. I am concerned that very few authors would be able to earn a living from writing.

Ah. But you've proposed no method by which anyone could distinguish a "professional" author, who "should" earn a living at writing, from an amateur who's welcome to post content for free. (Or would amateurs be censored to force people to pay for professional works--perhaps DailyKos should be shut down to get people to buy newspapers?)

Long before establishing prices and laws to enforce your ideas, you'd have to define the "authors" who'd benefit from them. You keep saying that authors shouldn't give their content away for free, but you haven't said how you mark the difference between someone who should get paid, and someone whose writing quality isn't worth paying for.

The mind boggles at the idea of an author crossing some invisible quality line and being informed they can no longer give away their works but now must charge.

As I stated in a previous post, the prices could be chosen based on previous revenue from similar works.

There are NO previous revenue numbers for many of the kinds of works that are currently being given away for free. Even the works that have something resembling a print precedent--many blogs are comparable to newspaper editorials--have no standards for payment; the standard is "whatever the market will bear." In some cases, editorial authors get paid a notable amount per column. In others, they get paid nothing... getting their name in the paper is payment enough. In a setting where publication itself is a rarity, being included in the paper is payment; there's no way to equate that to the value of a blog post.

Equally important: Who would they be required to get payments from? All readers, including family members? Would authors be able to give away promotional copies? (Is Cory Doctorow "devaluing writing" by giving away free ebooks to sell print books?)

Projected sales are made every day in the business world.

They are made from the premise that (1) someone wants to sell something and (2) someone else wants to buy it. Your mandatory payment idea seems to require a payment even when both of those elements are missing.

I do not have such data, and thus cannot provide it. Commerce could proceed much as it currently does, so long as the minimum prices are met. It would require government oversight to ensure that the minimum prices are charged.

What do you imagine those minimum prices would be?
This is a *crucial* question. What's the minimum price for an ebook novel of, say, 50,000 words... a dollar? Three dollars? Ten dollars?

What's the minimum fee for a 5,000 word short story? Is it allowed to be free if it's posted at a blog rather than arranged as an epub? Do you think the fanfiction sites should be shut down, or switched to mandatory-payment systems?

(How much money do you think my 13-year-old's fanfic is worth, anyway?)

And how much of those minimum payments would be taxed from them to pay for the gov't oversight?

Would retired authors who don't want to be bothered with extra tax problems and would prefer to write for free, be forced to deliver their content through underground file sharing programs?

What's the penalty for delivering free ebooks to readers?

"Commerce" isn't going to come up with any answers for these, because "commerce" isn't seeing a problem. There are authors. Some of them get paid; most of them don't; most of the ones that do, don't make enough from writing to live on. Since this has been the situation for at least the last 500 years, nobody's seeing a problem with that situation.

There is indeed more free, widely available content than there used to be, and if that interfered with author payments, we would have a problem. However, all evidence says that more free content means more readers, which means more people interested in buying *specific* content. More authors are making a living at their craft now than there were ten years ago. Why should we expect this to change?