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Originally Posted by JaneFancher
On the CC site, we operate completely on the honor system. We even say flat out that we don't have a problem with lending the file, just please, if the person likes it, remember how we make our living and come buy a legitimate copy. We all of us write books designed to be reread. If you like it once, you're going to like it better the second and third time through.
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There are a number of authors and small publishers who have similar attitudes--a bit of sharing is good, but they're nervous about giving any kind of official go-ahead for it. And that's understandable; our laws involving copyright are really, really screwy, and there's no way to give permission for "reasonable sharing and just don't be a jerk about it."
This is uncomfortable, and it's going to stay uncomfortable until/unless copyright law goes through some big changes. (Which are about due. Aside from the torrenting lawsuit psychoses, the attempts at 3-strikes punishments without convinctions, and the hassles of DRM removal for reasonable purposes--it's only a few years until The Mouse runs free. Expect Disney's lawyers to be launching a lawsuit to prevent that anytime in the next couple of years.)
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I totally agree about the community thing. I posted elsewhere about the critical mass syndrome of publishing that has been completely destroyed by the Thor Tool decision. In that sense, ebooks will, I'm convinced, be the saviors of true alternative, quality fiction.
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It's really pretty exciting, and just getting started.
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This. Yes.
I want to go track down big publishers and tell them, do something *now*, while ebooks are young and tiny and the ebook market has no specific shape or direction. Try bold things,
stupid things, because the old methods aren't going to work here, and right now--for the next few years and then it's gone--anything you do in the ebook market will have
almost no effect on the pbook market.
Ebooks are a tiny niche with big enough attention being paid to them, that whoever is at the forefront of the first *working* model is going to get rich off it.
That may be Baen. It may be Harlequin, which uses DRM, and has ebooks that go out of print regularly (you can't get last year's ebooks on their site), but their books are cheap enough to be impulse buys, numerous enough to be subscriptions (they're formulaic enough to lack any surprises--either you like them or you don't), and if they're massively torrented (they are), it doesn't matter because their business model has never focused on convincing everyone to buy new books, but on getting the word out that there's *always* new ones available for purchase right now. It may be tiny groups like Closed Circle, authors working together to make *good* ebooks, and pitching them to sympathetic audiences.
It won't be the Kindle model, with its convoluted DRM rules and incompatibility with most devices, and Amazon's creepy overseer abilities. It won't be the iBookstore, with its even more restrictive setup. Those are going to remain niche markets (even if they're the *biggest* ebook markets at the moment), because they're *failing to catch the majority of readers.*
The majority of the potential ebook market is currently blog-surfing more than reading ebooks, because paying for badly-formatted content is almost against their religion. And mainstream publishers are utterly failing to catch their attention, because it's never occurred to them that the sales pitch can't be "Top on the NYT bestseller list!" but needs to be closer to "More fun than an hour of clicking at TVTropes.com!"
I don't know what sales model(s) will work eventually; it's all scrambled right now. I'm enjoying seeing *different* business models, 'cos the old ones are not going to work in the long run.