Quote:
Originally Posted by nboshart
Whoa, intense debate.
O'Reilly did a study on file sharing and its effects on ebook sales, unfortunately it's $99.00 USD. Has anyone read it?
Link: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596157876/#top
There are lots of stories of free ebooks building momentum for an author, including the one about Paulo Coehlo getting caught by his publisher torrenting his own ebook. Sometimes it works, sometimes (in the wake of Chris Anderson's 'Free' debacle) it doesn't. I think when it works, it's largely due to the author's online participation. Building community, offering people something without just taking their money.
And I absolutely disagree with anyone saying artists should not get paid. I think people should have the chance to get paid for the work they do, to tell their stories and to suggest anything else is classist. Poor people cannot both write and work; art would become nothing more than leisure time for the elite. People need to eat. |
I don't think any of us pro-filesharing types are anti-payment, but I, personally think it's pointless to charge fixed prices for digital work, especially fiction. The greater questions that this debate actually fosters are:
1: If copyright as it stands is meaningless in the digital world and copyright was the guarantor for a writer to create and earn an income, then what can we replace copyright with?
2: If the barrier to sharing is so low that sharing will occur, despite any attempts to stop said sharing, how does a writer monetize their work?
My own opinion is that the creative-commons (and possibly the GPL but I haven't looked too far into that) are the best licensing solutions in the interim. The creator keeps as much control as possible, while giving the audience a fair use of the cultural artifact (copying, remixing etc). I don't think anybody, not even the most fervent copyright exponents could argue with that deal.
As to monetization I'm 99% sure that the pay-after-you-enjoy-and-what-you-deem-worthy model is the way to go. A lot of writers are experimenting with subscriptions or pay-me-x-amount to write, but I find both as cutthroat and unworkable as the old pay-before-you-enjoy model we have now.
One thing is certain, to me anyway, we can't continue with the system we have in place now. In that system both the creator and the audience are getting ripped off, only the publishers win.