[Xenophon]

Charbax:

Of course those things could be done -- it's just a SMOP (small matter of programming). But that's a very different claim than you were making earlier. There's a world of difference between "these parts <list of pieces> could potentially be combined to make it possible to..." and "Advance money is managed by Web 2.0 by..." (I added italics to your wording to highlight the key problem point.) You do see this difference, right?

And I most definitely and deliberately include the usual cynicism heard when calling something "just a SMOP." It's much like the difference between "I think that the Web can be used to disintermediate middlemen so that customers can get books (and many other products) quickly and cheaply -- it's a small matter of programming" on the one hand, and "I'm Jeff Bezos and I've built Amazon.com" on the other.

On to your second paragraph. Combining those things would be only the barest beginning to "pretty accurately give money to the artists from a subscription model or from a tax model based on the popularity of their works. Same thing for advanced payments." To achieve the "pretty accurately" part, you need to figure out how to keep people from gaming the system. See problems with internet voting. And click fraud. And on, and on. And even after you get that part done, you still need to take on issues of privacy, security, authentication and authorization, and far more. And with the billions of dollars that are at stake (all of it Other People's Money, by the way) you'll have a much harder time than (for example) Amazon and eBay have now. After all, if I try to fraudulently boost the popularity numbers for a book at Amazon right now, I have to actually pay them to do so. But if it's just clicks and OPM, well...

And after all of those issues comes the politics. How are you proposing to keep Mrs. Grundy (excuse me, that's Senator Grundy) from deciding that <fill in your favorite type of novel here> is just too extreme to be supported by public money? And how do you plan to keep the government's nose out of the records to avoid problems like the ones I alluded to in your other thread? And will your solution work when <fill in your least favorite politicians here> are running the government? Remember, it's not the good guys who are the problem, it's those other evil types from the other side of the fence (whichever side you're not on, that is).

And let's not forget that the defenders of High Culture (TM) will insist that their favorite art forms should receive more funding than the popularity numbers warrant. As will the defenders of low, middle, and off-the-wall culture! You'll have to fend them all off somehow too.

For your last paragraph, "share of book publishing industry revenue" is a very very different question than your original "Publishers taking 75% of my ebook money or tax dollars for free ebook[...]." Some simple arithmetic that fits on the back of a napkin will demonstrate that the publishers never even see anything close to "75% of my ebook money." Even in (most of*) the ebook industry, there's a distributor and a retailer. Each of those parties gets their mark-up -- typically 35% to 60%, but sometimes as much as a 2x markup. Quickly applying a little arithmetic, we see that the publishers gross is somewhere between 55% and 39% of the retail cost (25% with the least cost-efficient retailers and distributors). If you're talking straight revenue, that's the end of the story. If you're talking profits, you need to remember that the authors get paid out of the 25-55%. So do the editors, and the publicists, and the guy that formats the books, and the tax accountants, and the secretary who really keeps the place running, and on and on. Aside: yes, I know that the marginal cost of the next ebook sale is much lower than for the next paper book sale. Bits are wonderful that way. But they don't (yet) make up a large enough fraction of total sales for that effect to seriously kick in.

Lastly, far from "more and more 10-man Science Fiction publishers have to close down shop," the one I've been using for my real-world example has been growing (measured by unit sales, by gross revenue, and by profits) at better than triple the rate of the rest of the publishing industry. They even grew in the past year while the rest of publishing (broadly speaking) shrank. And they have an average sell-through of around 80% (If you don't know what that means -- and how unusual it is -- ask one of the authors who show up here to explain it to you). Oh yeah -- they're also one of the very few in the publishing industry who understand that eBooks should be inexpensive and DRM free because that combination maximizes sales and profits for the publisher AND royalties for the authors AND benefit for the customers. They've put their money where their mouth is (and have gotten lots of my money as a satisfied customer as a result).

So please, do us all a favor: Be careful to distinguish clearly what is proposal, opinion, hypothesis, future direction (or whatever) from how things are now. That means -- as an example -- phrasing things like "Advance money is managed by Web 2.0 quite simply[...]" as something more like "It seems to me that advance money could be managed through a suitable measurement system using measured popularity to compute the size of advance an author would (hypothetically) receive from the tax money pool I've proposed that we should create." (or something like that). Your original wording makes it sound like authors should be running outside with buckets 'cause it's raining money -- right now! Being clear about that distinction might help you to avoid sounding like you've been hitting the Kool-Aid too hard. And then -- just maybe -- we could have a useful discussion with more light than heat.

Xenophon