[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

You do not know whether the majority of people is willing to pay for their goods or not. There are no reliable statistics on this sort of thing, or if you do have them, I would be extremely interested.

As I said, some evidence is anecdotal... some (like King's The Plant) are well-documented. Fact is, there is more "evidence" of any kind that the majority of people, when given the choice, do not pay. There is no evidence of a large number of creators getting well-paid from "tip jars."

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Hey, I don't mind ads. But I think you'll find a large portion of people will either ignore them or strip them from the content, and within days ad-supported ebook content becoming a 'standard' you will see ad stripping tools pop up all over the place.

Sure they will. But not everyone will use them. And for those who do, the advertisers can always come up with new ads that defeat the blockers... a constantly-escalating war.

Advertisers have never worried about getting everyone who sees their ads to buy... they work in proportions: Of those who see the ads, X% inquire further; of that X%, Y% will buy. Once they know how many people will see the ads (even if for a second, before they are blocked or ignored), they know what to pay for exposure. And it is up to them to increase exposure by escalating the ad war.

But in the meantime, the e-books are free. And as long as the ads aren't too bothersome (or, even better, are slightly entertaining), most customers historically just let them be.

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

And this thing with "the author is not paid he/she will not write" - well I just do not believe this - sure there are authors that stopped writing because of lack of commercial success, but I profoundly doubt that was due to "piracy" and that a method as above would have made any difference.

Few authors are going to quit because of the impression that "someone stole all my books." If they quit, it's because they didn't make the money they wanted, for whatever reason that was.

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

If you write stuff that enough people find compelling - which I think is not as easy as it sounds - and if you can manage to find those people for which the stuff you wrote is for - and that is pretty hard too considering the amount of stuff that's out there - I think you will monetize the experience somehow.

Without commercial success to count on, not only will you see fewer writers, but you'll see less of a support base for them, i.e., editors, proofers, printers, artists, etc... so you'll get a much less polished product. There may be plenty of e-books, but if they have ugly (or no) covers, and read as if they were written by grade-schoolers... who will want to read them?