Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The idea that an author should have to rely on people who are "fanatics" (and that's what the word "fan" is an abbreviation of, don't forget) strikes me as a little odd. If I sell a book, it is a product like any other. I (or my publisher) sets a price for it; the customers decides whether or not to buy it. When I go to my local supermarket and do my shopping, I don't buy specific products because I am "fanatical" about them, but merely because I like them as products. Why try to pretend that "creative" works are any different?
|
When you sell a book, you sell a creative idea, you sell the rights to a publisher who then transforms those ideas in to a physical object made of atoms; 'the paper book'. The object is then sold as is any other object in the marketplace. It has an inherent value because it is an object after all, doesn't matter what you did to make up the words or how long it took, the object itself has a price that nobody can deny (paper costs money, printing etc).
Once the object becomes digital the price is reduced to zero. Digital objects have no inherent value, comparisons to atom-based real-world examples are pointless and do not work. And there's no pretending going on here, 'all' digital works have zero inherent value, they are nothing but zeros and ones re-arranged into a particular order. The audience gives those zero's and ones value, if they deem it right. Creative works aren't any different than anything else, except when they are. You can't digitize an apple or a bowl of Kellog's Cornflakes, you will always have to pay for them at whatever price the market and the producer decide will make them a profit. But when it comes to fiction there's an abundance of digital product. You could stop buying books right now and happily read for the rest of your life without paying anyone anything if you kept it to the digital side of the equation.
So that begs the question; in an age of abundance, where there is no scarcity (apart from the false scarcity imposed by DRM) how does an artist make a living? According to Chris Anderson there's a gap appearing between those who are 30+ and those below 30 years of age. One side, still routed in the physical payment model really can't surmount the idea of object=fixed payment, the other side, having grown up in a digital culture that is almost always zero cost, don't understand the idea of digital object=fixed payment. Think of it like this, if I have a choice between two authors (both whom I admire) and one of them offers work for zero cost and the other offers their work for £5, who am I more likely to read first? Who am I more likely to recommend blind to other readers? Who am I more likely to feel an affinity for after the reading is done (even if I didn't like the book) and give a 'donation' or other payment?
A whole generation 'expect' free product. From open-source operating systems, to the bands they're growing to love on Myspace and Youtube, they're all offering work for free and foregoing the old payment model. Product=fixed price just doesn't work anymore in the world (apart from those who still think it works, but that won't last very long).
And lest we forget your zeroing in on one word to make your whole argument. Fan could just as easily be replaced with 'donator' 'sponsor' 'patron' or 'customer' in my first quoted statement.
