My latest Guardian column is “In the digital era free is easy, so how do you persuade people to pay?” and it’s a first approximation of a taxonomy of reasons to buy stuff that you can download for free from unauthorized sites. I find that discussions about digital sales are often muddied by arguments about whether a particular strategy is good or bad for business, and I hope that by enumerating as many of the selling-propositions as we can and the strategies that complement or undermine them, we can improve the debate:

Buy this because you’re supporting something worthwhile

This is the proposition made by indie artists and it’s one reason so many major entertainment companies hive off “indie” labels, imprints and brands. Supporting the arts feels genuinely good – knowing that your money is going to someone who made some work that moved you and entertained you. This may be the most powerful motivator of all, but it’s also the trickiest.

For this to be really effective, the customer needs to have a sense of the person or people behind the work. That means this proposition favours artists with highly visible, personal public profiles, and not every artist has it in them to hang out there in the world with their audience. Some people are just shy. Some are worse than shy – some artists have negative charisma, and every time they appear in public (physically or virtually), they reduce the business case for buying their works.

The paradox of this proposition is that most high-profile artists got their profile through the good offices and extensive expenditures of a publisher, label, studio or other intermediary. But artists who are backed by these intermediaries are seen as less “worthwhile” than their independent counterparts – after all, the proposition is “support an artist,” not “support a giant company that takes most of the money and gives some of it to an artist” (no matter how much the artist may value that arrangement and believe it to be a fair one).

In the digital era free is easy, so how do you persuade people to pay?

The Guardian’s Comment is Free video team recorded an interview with me after the TEDxObserver event. They’re editing it into a series of quick pieces; the first one, about kids, privacy, and social networks, just went live. I really like the way they put it together!

The most powerful mechanism we have for securing the privacy of individuals is for them to care about that privacy

I’m absolutely delighted to announce that I’ll be the guest of honor at the 75th Philcon in Cherry Hill, NJ, Nov 18-20 2011. Philcon is the oldest science fiction convention in the world; it’s one I’ve attended a dozen times or so, and I’m honored to be invited on such an auspicious occasion.

I’ve recently lent my support to Worldreader, an innovative nonprofit program that distributes ebook readers to children in the developing world and then exposes them to a large library of donated texts from writers from across the world, as well as newspapers and other materials. I was delighted to give them access to all my books (of course), and put them in touch with a large group of other kids’ and young adult writers who were happy to do the same (including my hero Daniel Pinkwater, who travelled in and wrote about Kenya and has a real love of Africa).

WR: What advice do you have for kids in developing countries who are just beginning to read and only have recently gotten access to books because of technology advancements?

Cory: I have a couple of pieces of advice about reading. One is that the most dangerous thing in the world is someone who has only read one book. The great thing about reading is that you can triangulate your ideas among lots of different authors, different times, or different place. When you read widely and broadly it shows you that everything is relative. It shows that there is a lot of ways of looking at things, and often times, problems can become solutions if looked at creatively.

The other piece of advice I would give them about reading electronically is to not allow their collections to be tied to one device or platform. Devices come and go, but data can live forever. The only way you can maintain access to them is if you insist on the ability and the right to move the books into any format or any platform you want to.

Writers Changing Lives: A Chat With Cory Doctorow