Fides <fides at kludgeco.com> writes: > 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. At Baen Webscriptions, you can get the ebook before the hardcover release is out; in fact that's a lot of the attraction to a lot of people. > 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. I think you're right that most people would prefer to be legit if the terms don't look horrible. And that a certain number of people will avoid being legit even if there's no point. And copies that continue to work, i.e. not protected, not tied to the computer serial number, copies they can load into their Palm pilot to read on the train, copies they can back up to CD for the future, etc. On the other hand, I don't think there are a lot of promising fiction authors who aren't getting published through traditional channels. Possibly for essayists and other non-fictional forms there are; but I doubt it (I just don't know that market very well). -- 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