Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Contrary to popular belief, artists aren't special snowflakes. They create and publish work only if they have the incentive and resources to do so.
|
Not all incentives are financial.
I do understand that the quick-ebook-income is mostly confined to fiction, and that nonfic is having, and will have, problems making money as it's competing with both the blogosphere and countless books written and published in a matter of weeks.
OTOH, we're seeing an explosion of books of types that were never very marketable on paper: novellas, 20k-word academic articles (too long for a journal; too short for a book), short stories as individual economic units, mega-novels of 250k+ words, collections of a year of news posts with links and references.
Writing is in no danger. Writing-for-income is in no danger. Some types of writing-for-income will be harder to get money from; some will be easier.
And since there's a serious demand for quality nonfiction, *and* plenty of people who want to write it, *and* the technology to distribute it, it's not going to vanish. Nothing involved in that is a vanishing resource; the problems are entirely socio-political, and socio-political problems yield to market demand when there's no hard limits stopping them.
It's possible that, in the future, being a novelist will, on the average, be more profitable than being a biographer... but nobody (sane) goes into either field to get rich.
For all the chatter about the impending doom of various literary careers, I'm not seeing more out-of-work authors now than there were 15 years ago. (Well. Not more than the general populace. With a ~10% unemployment rate nationwide, there are, hypothetically, 10% less *everything* than we'd like.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
Within days of the Megaupload arrrests, various file locker sites changed policy and so as to make it harder to store pirated files
|
You didn't answer the question: any evidence of
less illegal downloading? (Mediafire, Rapdshare, YouSendIt, Glumbouploads, Filefactory, Filereactor, Crocko, Bitshare, and Netload seem to be fairly unaffected.) Will media companies announce higher revenues next quarter because MegaUpload is now gone--or was this a publicity stunt more than an actual blow against piracy?