Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Anybody; publisher, independent, collective or what-have-you that continues to charge set prices, or any price at all will be dead in the market place within 5 years. The rules of object=price are gone, and they're never coming back. It's all going to be good will and community, and that's the bottom line. That's what the internet does best. Good will and community. Writers will have to work ten times as hard, do everything for themselves and still bite the bullet and give it all away for free in the hopes that somewhere down the line their hard work is rewarded either monetarily or in kind.
This isn't a fanciful notion, it's not even a philosophical notion, it's merely practical. When you can get the cow and the milk for free, who the f**k would pay for a milkman?
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On the contrary:
Nothing about this is
practical.
Good will and community?
Right. Expecting all those experienced, professional writers to just "write for free" is just plain nuts. People have to make livings, including writers... and given a complete loss of income, and no future income to even dream of, they will simply walk, get paying jobs elsewhere, and as hobbyists and evangelists come to dominate writing, the amount and quality of available writing will
plummet.
(As for the whole "cow and milk" thing: A capitalist economy is the only thing that provides the volume and quality of milk for everyone... if it were free, or people were allowed to invade others' farms and draw their own milk, how many farmers would go through the trouble of keeping and taking care of cows, just to give away the milk? This saying simply does not apply to a non-limited product, but if you insist:
The majority of people will never see a drop of milk, because the farmers will stop keeping cows.)
So let's put aside this "Age of Aquarius" talk and start talking about realistic,
workable futures.
In terms of e-books, publishers will find themselves fighting to gain business from good authors who are finding that they can do more of the total publishing job themselves. Pubs may find that their future income will come from authors, not the other way around... being paid for one-time services to edit and prep a book for e-book dissemination, instead of making money through actual book sales. This will mean a necessary shrinking of publishing houses, essentially, to editing shops, possibly with promotional services included in their portfolios.
Some pubs may morph into portals used to find e-books, but the e-books will be sold by the authors themselves (because it gives them immediate and total control of their income), and the pubs will make income from referrals (if someone found a book through your portal, you get a cut of the sale). Portals will also fight for market share, being that authors will have to feel enough sales are being driven through their portals to merit using them at all.
The fight between editors/publishers (and their perception of the value of their work) and authors (and their perception of the value of their work) will dictate e-book pricing, but it will be lower than today's typical prices for comparable printed products. Higher prices will usually indicate the status of the publisher the author worked with... lower prices may mean no publisher was used at all. It will still be considered an
intimation of higher quality to use a publisher, but not as absolutely as it is considered today, especially as more quality self-published e-books appear and prove to the market that publisher-less quality is possible.
Above all, format and delivery standardization will eventually take hold, and remove a lot of the unnecessary flotsam that accompanies e-book production now. We are in a "Model-T Ford" state of e-book production, and as such, may have a long way to go before we reach what will be considered the "standard" e-book going forward.
And yes... there will be some form of security applied to e-books, to mitigate loss through theft, just like every other paid-for product in the world. The method will most likely be
biometric in nature.
Hey, that's why they call it "speculation."