[Moejoe]

I think what we're seeing here is a cultural rift between European ideas of subsidisation and a more American idea of individual liberty.

I agree with a lot of what Charbax is saying and I think that is mainly because I come from a country that has arts subsidy at almost every level. We're culturally biased toward an idea of 'sharing' from the get go, whatever European country we may live in. Taxation is almost a natural extension of that idea to us. Also, being a pragmatist, I can't see how the publishing industry can survive in a world with ebook readers and widespread sharing of intellectual works.

Let's address some of the points others have made, and I apologise in advance for not quoting the individuals. A point was raised as to the efficiency and usefulness of the copyeditor in the publishing process. Now, I'd agree, that a good copyeditor can polish the proverbial turd and turn it into gold, but, and this is a massive but (pun intended) just pick a random selection of best-sellers from your local bookstore and take a look at what is actually being printed. Verbose, meandering, fat tomes of unadulterated rubbish is pumped out every day by the publishing industry. A lot of it has barely seen the red pen. I give you, and I mean no offence to fans, the last four or five books of Stephen King as evidence, anything by James Patterson in the last five years, and most contraversial of all, the Harry Potter series. (Yes I fully expect to be hunted down and killed for this one).

In an industry with such razor thin margins quality and individual expression are never high on the agenda. The fabled editors of yore who would mould and cultivate a young writer are all but gone. This is a bottom-line industry and the only aim now is to find and market a product. A product which is becoming less and less culturally relevant in the face of modern entertainments and social attitude (What caring enviromentalist could truly support an industry built upon the destruction of trees?).

And then we come sharply to the inequity that is built into the publishing industry. When we see the top 1% of writers taking in the majority of the profit, how can we not wish for a more equal relationship to occur? How can we not wish for more individual voices to be allowed a moment in the sun, maybe even enough moments to grow into something fulfilling and worthwhile. Advances for the new writer are laughable, profits, if any, are measured in the low percentile. In this atmosphere any writer has to be a Patterson, King or Rowling to be worthwhile to the industry. This then leads to a homogenous, porridge of releases fit only for the plane journey and beach retreat. I give, my learned friends, as pure an example as I can find -- the recent popularity of the Twilight series. A more asinine, badly-written, unpolished turd as there ever was.

Where does that leave us and the publishing industry in the face of modern technologies? Well, for the writer, there is no better time to go it alone. Subsidisation may not be the end-all panacea the writer is looking for, but in coutnries that are favourable to taxtation for the arts, it maybe one method for the writer to survive. On the other hand, digital publishing by the sole author is more viable now than ever before. And it is this the lone author that will finally kill the publishing industry.

A writer does not have to set any fixed price, he has no major overheads to consider apart from hosting a website and the tools with which to produce the original work. Translations, as we've seen with Cory Doctorow's work, can be undertaken by eager and willing fans of the work. Editing can be done by the writer if he's so inclined, shared amongst 'alpha-testers' or outsourced to a more critical eye. The argument of quality derived from the series of hurdles a writer must go through in the traditional publishing industry is almost laughable when we look at the 'quality' of what is released by that same industry every day. The writer, alone, setting his own price, working at whatever pace he may wish, and in direct contact with the readers becomes his own publishing industry. This writer, savvy with P2P distribution, excited by what technology offers and working under his own profit incentives, cannot be beat by an industry that is still trying to fit an old business model into into the connected world. This new writer is free to write whatever fancy he likes without worry or fear of the bottom-line, he gives his writing away free and asks in return only the kindness of strangers to keep him going.

The future may not be subsidized, but it is more than likely to be gifted from reader to writer and back again. Maybe, in that future we'll see more rubbish, but we'll also discover diamonds and those diamonds, for us the readers, will cost less and less. In this model individual liberty and collective sharing becomes part and parcel of the way things are.

For me, the publishing industry is a dinosaur looking up into the sky as the comet approaches, a puzzled look upon its face.