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cory doctorow
readers will be readers forever, and they are positively pervy for
paper.
But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all
anyone wants.
I don’t think it’s practical to charge for copies of electronic
works. Bits aren’t ever going to get harder to copy. So we’ll have to
figure out how to charge for something else. That’s not to say you
can’t charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can’t force a reader
to pay for access to information anymore.
This isn’t the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone
through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to
transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control
over who could hear a performance (if they don’t buy a ticket,
you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose
twelve-year-old could build a crystal set, the day’s equivalent of
installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were busi-
ness-models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn’t easy.
Who could have foreseen that radio’s great fortunes would be had
through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional con-
sent decree, chartering a collecting society, and inventing a new
form of statistical mathematics to fund it?
Predicting the future of publishing — should the wind change
and printed books become obsolete — is just as hard. I don’t know
how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I
do
know
that I’ll never find out by turning my back on the Internet. By
being in the middle of electronic publishing, by watching what
hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my ebooks, I get
better market intelligence than I could through any other means.
As does my publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work
as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck
are just as serious. They’ve got even more riding on the future of
publishing than I do. So when I approached my publisher with
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