Dragaera

Artificial release dates and online publishing

David Dyer-Bennet dd-b at dd-b.net
Tue Dec 10 11:15:11 PST 2002

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
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