Caliann the Elf <calianng_graves at yahoo.com> writes: > The first problem with this has already been addressed: Most > established authors already have contracts which they must fulfill. And even if they didn't, would want more money than such a site could pay. This theory that there's a huge well of talent out there just waiting to be exploited is pretty laughable to anybody who's seen actual "slushpile" manuscripts. > 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. It took me 2 hours to OCR and correct Yendi; and yet paper copies still sell decently. I see (bad) digital versions of all sorts of books posted to newsgroups a lot (by annoying twits), but those books are largely in print and selling decently, too. Admittedly going to a lot of trouble to "protect" a digital book will motivate people to defeat the protection. > Although theft of books has always been somewhat of a problem, it > would be MUCH more of a problem if they were published online. This hasn't been the experience so far with the Baen Free Library, or their Webscriptions program. They make them available in a bunch of formats, including straight HTML, and they seem to actually *increase* the sales of the paper versions, and related books. Now, a theory that we can't disprove yet is that there are so few people interested in ebooks currently that using it as a promotional channel is the sensible thing to do. I don't know how things will go when *most* books are read in electronic format. Baen seems happy, though. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info