Caliann the Elf wrote: > The first problem with this has already been addressed: Most established authors already have contracts which they must fulfill. > > The second problem is copyright. No matter how hard you try and how many cascade transparencies you put up on a site, SOMEONE will manage to break it and steal the data. Once it is sent out once it will be sent out to whomever wants it. That means the work will be available free-of-charge to whomever want it...and the author won't get paid. > > Although theft of books has always been somewhat of a problem, it would be MUCH more of a problem if they were published online. I think this will be more of a problem when you get bigger audiences. Admittedly most on-line fic/books that I know off are available for free. However some of them were published and sold prior to their net release (traditionaly 1 year for fanfic, 6 months for original fic). I don't actually know of any cases where someone has bought a Zine (and some of them really aren't cheap), scanned it and put it up during the lag time. However that might partly be due to the larger overlap between the readers and the writers. I think if you have young up and coming (ie not famous) writers people probably won't be bothered to crack the system. When it gets to the point where you have people bothering to do that you know you have arrived and whichever author it is probably have enough real fans that the small number of cheapskates (who probably weren't going to pay for it anyway) may actually not make that much difference. I think the way to win on that one is to have a loyal fanbase and to charge a reasonable amount. Most people would prefer legit copies of things given the option. The middle ground of course is to have a fiction equivilent of Keenspot. Authors can have tip jars (and people do support their favorite cartoonists that way) and also get a percentage of any profit made in a given year (not much so far but that is besides the point).I doubt it would get the authors enough to live on but it would support ammature efforts. They are also starting to do dead tree comics now (and run a comic book store) so it's feasible that one of there more popular cartoons could go big. You could possibly do something like that if you aren't trying to do something people plan to live off and if you could find some authors. Don't actually charge for the on-line version just have a tipjar that goes to the author. And then either sell dead-tree versions (zine printers will do small runs which you won't get with big publishers) and have a lag before they go up on line and/or allow people to do pick and mix books of their favourite short stories (money split between you, printer and author). It probably won't be worth the effort of scanning the hard copy version to post early and once they are on-line it's free anyway so as long as they link to you and/or give propar credits (which most will do) then any escaped copies are just good publicity for you. As to whether people will buy dead tree versions when they can read it for free on-line - until they make electronic paper that doesn't give you a head ache and which you can read in the bath you are probably fine. Fides