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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I think it'll stick around. The pay-up-front model for entertainment far predates books, and artists (or "producers of entertaining content," if you don't consider what they make to be art) are going to demand some level of recompense to keep making what makes other people happy.
The public will *find* a way to pay them. I suspect that, over the next decade or two, we'll see a drastic erosion of middleman companies. They won't go away, because there'll always be a use for editing and marketing skills that some artists can't or don't want to acquire. But we'll see a lot more "small business" artists of all types, setting up their own websites & using their promotional skills to get people to pay them in a multitude of different ways.
We'll see pay-by-chapter, and social DRM, and "enhanced" paid packages (for free you get an image-only PDF or a string of blog posts; for $4 you get a collection of ebook types with color book covers & a personalized message from the author), and tie-ins with physical sales ("licensed ebook purchase gets you $2 off the cost of the t-shirt") and all sorts of other marketing methods. A lot of them will flop. A lot of the artists will actually be really lousy at their chosen craft, and think that since they're happy to spend an hour a day typing, they are authors, and someone will pay them to put out 80,000 words of navel-gazing ramble.
But in the scrambled mix, I expect we'll find new *effective* marketing methods. They may be a lot more varied... which opens opportunities for individuals & small companies to do the legwork of finding out which one will work for which artists, and charge for the results.
I don't expect "more effective DRM" to be part of the eventual solution pack. I'm with Doctorow in believing that things will *never* be harder to copy than they are right now; the new digital economies won't be dependent on preventing copies. They may be dependent on discouraging copies, but they'll use different methods for that, not something that keeps customers from reading their previously-purchased ebooks on their new tablets.
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The pay-up-front may pre-date books, but there's not really anything in our history that can prepare us for the abundant nature of digital entertainment. And yes, there's money to be made on the pay-up-front model, for now, but the book buying audience at this moment in time is predominantly one that grew up on the idea of the object equaling value model. There's a great deal of nostalgic and fetishistic spillover from our earlier experiences when it comes to our consumption of media, generally speaking. I just can't see how the younger generations will continue with a pay-up-front model. Not when they've grown up with free everything, on -demand, instantly available products. Pay-as-you-like might have a chance (it's the one I'd prefer be in place) and at least it is equitable across the board, but I'm not holding my breath on that one either.
One thing is for sure, if you're in this for the mula and you're not hitting Amazon with at least 80% of your effort then you're shooting yourself in the foot. Although it pains me to say so, Amazon are for all purposes the winners in the format war.