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give us a glimpse into the far future

These glimpses into the far future are never anywhere near what the real futire will be. Consider Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, where they were shot to the moon not with a rocket, but a cannon. Or Asimov's "Multivac" or even Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe, where the internet (not called the internet, of course) breaks down when one of the machines actually gives out information!

"Now, now, honey!" I says. "I didn't know about all this! It's new! But they musta fixed the tank so it won't give out information except to the logic where a person lives!"

"Nothing of the kind!" she tells me, furious. "I tried! And you know that Blossom woman who lives next door! She's been married three times and she's forty-two years old and she says she's only thirty! And Mrs. Hudson's had her husband arrested four times for nonsupport and once for beating her up. And--"

"Hey!" I says. "You mean the logic told you this?"

"Yes!" she wails. "It will tell anybody anything! You've got to stop it! How long will it take?"

"I'll call up the tank," I says. "It can't take long."

"Hurry!" she says, desperate, "before somebody punches my name! I'm going to see what it says about that hussy across the street."

She snaps off to gather what she can before it's stopped. So I punch for the tank and I get this new "What is your name?" flash. I got a morbid curiosity and I punch my name, and the screen says: "Were you ever called Ducky?" I blink. I ain't got no suspicions. I say, "Sure!" And the screen says, "There is a call for you."

Mind you, this story was written less than fifty years before the real internet materialized.

Don't forget that there are going to be inventions and discoveries that nobody today can dream of. When the laser was invented, nobody could think of a use for it, except maybe ray guns. Now they're in everything, it seems.

Science fiction, rather than telling us how the future will be, invariably tells us exactly how the future won't be. believe me, I've been reading science fiction since today's reality was science fiction, and none of it happened as the authors said it was going to.

http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm/ to save the students money

Agent of Vega or another one of the James Schmitz selections
Crown of Slaves - David Weber (Harrington universe) - long
Mother of Demons - Eric Flint
Mountains of Morning - Lois McMaster Bujold
Oath of Swords - David Weber fantasy
Pandora's Legion - Christopher Anvil
Sleipnir - Linda Evans
A Logic Named Joe - Murray Leinster
Starliner - David Drake

and many others

Free library of Baen science fiction books http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

This is run by Baen but carries other publishers books. It is a no drm subscription service. You can also get electronic advanced reader copies of some books.
http://www.webscription.net/

You can buy individual books or a monthly offering.
http://www.webscription.net/c-81-2009-webscriptions.aspx

The writings at the Baen Free Library explains why piracy is not an issue for paper books.

Long live the smell of *real* books!

That is all.

So, what you are saying, is that we will not be able to walk around nude in the great frozen north? Ref: Fallen Angels

No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.

You're free to make that choice. But:

(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. I write science textbooks and science fiction. In the areas that I'm familiar with, one good example of a highly successful alternative strategy is the Baen Free Library of science fiction books. A couple of other very talented professional SF writers who make their work available for free online are Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum. For a few hundred other (mostly nonfiction) examples, see my sig. (I'm not a particularly well known SF author, but here is where I've done the same thing with my fiction. My nonfiction is free online here.)

(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work. Back in the 1980s we went through the whole DRM fiasco before. Back then it was called "copy protection." You would buy software on a 5-inch floppy disk, and it would have various formatting trickery that made it hard to copy. Users hated it. For one thing, they couldn't back up their software properly, so as soon as the disk wore out, they had lost their investment. Users voted with their feet, refusing to buy copy-protected software. The result was that copy protection disappeared. Since then, various people have kept insisting on relearning the same lessons over and over. The outcome is always the same. DRM doesn't work, users hate it, and because users hate it, it ends up being a failure in economic terms.

And please, I'm sick of responses to my posts with some snide remark that you don't have DRM and yours is free with a link to the Pirate Bay. It's getting old. I want to support the content providers but I don't want to give up or inhibit my rights to access that content.

Not all authors and publishers ascribe to this mindset.
Customer for their services/products is the correct term...quit subscribing to the marketing hyperbole prevalent that enables this 'consumer' crap that disables choice!
Do you eat or drink the digital files? No! They are still available in their original form for infinite copies to download- you are only subscribing or purchasing as a customer of that service.

Consumer is a marketing term to enable the mindset of the customers to eliminate free choice and having a say in what and how they choose to purchase as a customer.
Bottom line: if you are not eating or drinking it, you are a customer, not a consumer. Quit enabling this crippling mindset, as it is detrimental to society, and future business.
I only consume as a customer in a pub or restaurant. Consuming has nothing to do with media, as the original copy is still available since I have not 'gobbled it up', thus making it unavailable to others. I don't 'consume' media...I either watch it, or listen to it, without affecting other's ability to do the same with that, or another infinite copy of said media.
Explain to me how I can 'consume', thus deplete, digital media, and I *might* entertain the whole consumption of any form of IP. Until then, you are just barking at the moon as far as I am concerned.
Any subscription model that uses DRM will eventually come around the tree and bite you in the ass. See:Walmart's digital service, MS's 'plays for sure' tech that they did not support on their own Zune player, Napster's subscription service, Rhapsody, etc....

All of the 'subscription' models suffer this same fate of leaving the customer 'high and dry'.(another downside to the 'consumer' mentality)

Instead of supporting the 'content providers', switch to supporting the 'artists', even if it takes the form of downloading from TPB, then slipping the actual artists with some cash with a note on why you went this route.
This misnomer that 'piracy' has a profound effect on the artist that has signed away his/their rights to the distributor is getting old and worn out. They typically sign away all rights to the distributor/label, and see slim, if any income from subsequent song/album sales.
Support them directly! Send an irrefutable message to artists and distributors/labels!
Trent Reznor and Radiohead, among others are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Labels and Distributors/content providers are still seeing a train as the light at the end of the tunnel, and want the fare proceeds to see/ride the train without reaising the light is sunlight, instead of another train.

It's like raising kids, or training horses...make it easy to 'do the right thing' and difficult to 'do the wrong/detrimental' things in life. It's not hard if you use your head and a little dedication to the advancement of society/horse training.**
Yeah, it sounds harsh and inhumane on the surface, but think about it....(why do humans try so hard to seperate themselves from our physical/animal world? I have found that raising kids is not significantly different from training 'other' animals in reality, until the human wants educated for a purpose...otherwise the same, doubt me and check what is popular on TV/Movies/music!)

**I have raised many horses, and a few children...the concept works fabulously when applied consistently and positively.

I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy â" while it is definitely illegal and immoral â" is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market â" especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people â" is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors â" how about you, Eric? â" were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And â" hey, whaddaya know? â" over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity. "But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost â" once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )

And yet it's been SHOWN that inexpensive, DRM-free books can be profitable. You need but look at Baen Books and Webscriptions.net to see that trusting your customers and not using DRM sells you even MORE e-books and dead tree books. But that, of course, requires some changing of business models, and we can't have THAT, can we ???

The book that I wrote is mine. It's content belongs to me. Period.

You're quite wrong. The book belonged to you (period), until the moment when you published it. Note the root of that word, pub- , it's very important.

From that moment in time, the book became part of public culture, progressively less and less yours and more and more a part of the public mind as its community of readers expands. And eventually, when it passes into the public domain, the work will not be yours at all, despite the fact that you will still be its author. See, there's a difference.

For a writer, you're curiously unaware of the relationship between a written work and the minds of readers. A book isn't the paper it's written on, but the words and ideas contained within. When a person reads your book, those words and ideas are inevitably donated to that reader, every last bit of them (the paper is irrelevant). Dwell on that a while, because you don't appear to have absorbed the implications.

For each person who reads your work, your "codified super insightful knowledge" (as you put it) becomes ever less exclusive, and if you are really popular then your exclusive hold over that knowledge drops close to nil: your work has become part of popular culture, and gained a momentum of its own. You are then no longer its owner but merely its author, and your earnings from it will be far more a product of the work's cultural significance than of your publisher's marketting. It will no longer be a "product", but an element of culture with earnings as a side effect.

You might wish to reflect a little on this essay from Baen: http://www.baen.com/library/ . As long as you are at war with your readers, I predict a future of hand-wringing and unhappiness.

Here's the best writeup on the subject I've seen by an author, at the Baen Free Library. Worth a read.
Along web their webscription.net Ebooks website, Baen seems to have a good handle on this whole digital media business.

http://www.baen.com/library/

There are some pretty big name authors here as well as new authors who are trying to make it. You can read the dissertation by that commie Eric Flint about "Online Piracy".

Baen Publishing is noted for including a CD with some hardback novels that has free novels in it. Surprisingly enough they've not cried foul when digital editions of those CD's have ended up online.

http://www.webscription.net/p-162-freehold.aspx You can read a good friends book here.

For anybody who's wondering what the hell you guys are talking about, Retief is the protagonist of a series of satirical science fiction books and short stories, some of which you can read here for free. Very fun stuff.

Sorry, formated so it doesn't suck.

Greed.
They'll still want their take.

Granted not all authors are like that but you tend to lean that way after a while.

Mr. Flint seems to have the right idea.

"Baen Books is now making available -- for free -- a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online -- no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. ) Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons. The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it. There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences! Alles in ordnung! I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:"

ect ect

http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

Greed. They'll still want their take. Granted not all authors are like that but you tend to lean that way after a while. Mr. Flint seems to have the right idea. "Baen Books is now making available -- for free -- a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online -- no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. ) Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons. The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it. There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences! Alles in ordnung! I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:" ect ect http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

It's because it boosts the sales of all their works, especially the one they put up for free. Honestly. They do it because it makes them more money.

Books that make money tend to only make money in the first few quarters, after that sale of those books plummet. The same is true for even blockbuster monster hit books, the difference being the low point for those books is about the same as the high point for your average successful book.

By putting a book that has been out a year or two online, they draw new readership, and a good percentage of the people who read it online either buy the paperback/hardcover of it to keep and read again, or they buy other books by the same author.

Go check out the Baen Free Library http://www.baen.com/library/, the editor/co-creator of the site for Baen Books explains why it works, his Prime Palever is pretty interesting too.

It's all Sci-Fi books, and there is a pretty good selection.

Basically, sure there are folks like you and me who don't really care for paper books, but most people find paper much easier and more enjoyable to read, and so tend to sample the online book, decide they like it, and buy it and others in dead tree format. An author may not want to release a book for free, but really it just makes sense after as little as a year to start putting it up for free.

Of course, as eBook readers get better and better and more people use them this business model will be less effective, but then you just adjust and do things a little differently. Right now though it is a very effective way to boost an author's sales.

I remember you that the case you describe was the center of the fud used for pushing the first huge copyright extention in history about 170 years ago...

se this:

Macaulay on copyright law

http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

to see how it was rebutted.

and remember, know the history or you will repeat it!

Baen Books, for instance, reports a rise in the sales of older titles after making those available for download (in this case legally).

As others have posted before me, The Pirate Bay is a terrible place to promote stuff because you disappear in the mass.

Myspace is probably better for music, but what you really want is a website that is known for offering similar music for download. That will give you the best chance that potential customers who like the genre listen in.
The Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) is a good place for checking out Science Fiction authors, and I buy most of my entertainment books from Baen these days.
If you can find a similar place to promote your style of music, I'm sure it will get you more attention than TPB.

I'm all for free exchange of information but when that means that products are being widely distributed free of charge on P2P networks even before you have had time to get them to market properly then something is wrong.

You are absolutely correct that something is wrong.
But that wrong started long ago, and isn't what you think it is. Here is a relevant quote:

"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions." (Emphasis mine)

That was from Thomas Babington Macaulay in a speech he gave to Parliament in 1841. The unintended consequence of arbitrarily extending copyright beyond all rationality is the public's complete disregard for any worth in copyright.

I believe the only way you will ever get people to respect copyright again is if you reduce it to something draconian and punitive, such as 2 years. Otherwise, the long term trend is that the number expensive works of art (such as multimillion dollar movies, games, and some music) will eventually diminish and you will get an explosion of public works. The question then becomes: is the collective value of works of art by the common man better than the value of one expensive work of art? Are all the free flash games combined better value than one Diablo V? Are all the homegrown computer animated movies of more value than Toy Story 7? I don't know, but when the public finishes taking back what should have been rightfully theirs decades ago, I suspect I will surely see a richer world than the one we have today.

Your analogy is flawed somewhat, as most people still prefer paper books to ebooks, but lets ignore that for the moment.

Look at the Baen Free Library - the authors themselves put up books for free download, in a variety of DRM-free formats. Every time an author does this, they see massive spikes in sales of their other books, *including* the book they put up for free. They also sell ebooks via webscriptions - and you know what? Those *also* see spikes in sales. They like libraries, and they like people lending their books around - they'd rather be read than forgotten, and getting someone to like your existing work makes them more likely to buy future works. Compare and contrast to the games industry, for example, which treats legal 2nd hand sales like copyright infringement, with DRM etc to prevent it if at all possible (steam, I'm looking at you too)

The truth is with publishing is there's very little long-tail. Unless you're a mega author, The sales you get in the first year are pretty much the vast majority of the money you'll ever make from that title. The trick is to get more people interested in your work in the first place, so that they go on to buy your back catalog.

Free illegal online stuff suffers from this too. The latest and greatest is where all the seeders are; try getting old or obscure stuff on the pirate bay, and you'll see that the field is littered with dead torrents, the seeders long having since gone away. That's somewhere that sellers have a niche; use the latest free stuff (which you don't even have to pay bandwidth for!) as a loss leader for your other works, which you sell, easily and DRM free. Convenience has value too - itunes thrives in a world where they're competiting with free, because it's more easily available, better catalogued, and because people are generally good and want to pay artists if they can. Those that won't pay, were *never your customers in the first place* so worrying about them is simply wasting your effort.

Hell, radio and TV has survived a good long time giving it all away for free, and doing adverts alongside it. the BBC iplayer (paid for by existing TV licences) and Hulu (adverts) are two examples of taking their existing model and doing it online. OK, you might be able to go and get the ad-free version online too, but if it's right *there* and fast and convenient, loads of people will put up with ads and go to the original source.

But ultimately, this is all irrelevent. lets imagine this freemazon, a giant library of all the published works of mankind, from the banal comedy to the greatest works of visual and written arts of history. Every book, film, TV, piece of music ever written available free to be enjoyed and to enlighten the public for all time, for them to draw inspiration from and create their own works.

I have a better name for it. The Public Domain. What copyright is FOR. We want this wonderful, amazing Public Domain for the benefit of the public. Lets create an incentive for people to create works and put them out there for everyone to enjoy. Copying is hard since you need a printing press, so we'll put the incentive there - you can be the only one allowed to print your works for a limited time, make some money, then it goes in the public domain. The public give something up (copyright is a limit on free speech; without copyright I'd just be using my free speech rights to say what I like, even if it is sharing something you wrote) and they get something back in return.

Copyright is supposed to be about the richness of the public domain; it's an incentive mechanism to get works into it. Now though, it's like a feudal system; serfs do all the work, and the barons take all the works themselves, and the serfs if they're lucky get to keep a fraction for their own benefit, while the general public only get what the barons allow them to have.

Copyright is the new feudal system; artists slave away for virtually no gain, and the public is robbed of its public domain with

No, it is up to the creator to decide how to distribute his/her work. Note Cory Doctorow's stand on the matter at http://craphound.com./ Cory releases all of his work under a Creative Commons (copyleft) license, so anyone at all can download his work for their own pleasure without paying him one single penny. How the hell does he make a living? Because there are enough of us who feel the work is valuable and are willing to pay money to him and his publisher for it. His latest novel is still on the New York Times bestseller list and is now in its 8th printing, has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has made him more money than any of his previous books.

Also take note of the policies at Baen Books http://www.baen.com/ a longtime publisher of science fiction that began posting the entire text of some of their books online for free a few years ago. They would let readers download and read the first book of a series for free, and then saw sales skyrocket for other books in the same series. You can purchase a hardcover copy of some of David Weber's Honor Harrington novels at Barnes and Noble, and in the back of the book you will find a CD-ROM containing the entire text of all the earlier books in the series. And you can read them for free. Baen is counting on you to enjoy them so that you will pay money for the next book in the series when it is published.

It may be counter-intuitive to 20th century MBAs, but this is a business model that works. Both TOR (which publishes Doctorow's books) and Baen Books are making money by giving away product for free. Radiohead made millions of dollars by allowing their fans to download their album "In Rainbows" on a PriceLine style "name your own price" model. Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have a similar pricing scheme for their music and likewise are making lots of money by cutting the record labels and the RIAA out of the process.

When artists take control of their own work, they know how to sell it, market it and profit from it, even if that means giving it away for free.

Hi,

i cannot praise Baen as much as they deserve. Their ebooks come in the format of your choice, completely free of any kind of DRM and some even any without charge (Baen Free Library with books like David Webers "Honor Harrington: On Basilisk station" or Lois McMaster Bujolds "Miles Vorkosigan: The Mountains of Mourning").

There is even a popular SF&F Author (Eric Flint) ranting against DRM, whose words most of you will take directly to the heart. There is still hope as there are publishers and authors who can read the writings on the wall.

Sincerely yours, Martin

Hi,

i cannot praise Baen as much as they deserve. Their ebooks come in the format of your choice, completely free of any kind of DRM and some even any without charge (Baen Free Library with books like David Webers "Honor Harrington: On Basilisk station" or Lois McMaster Bujolds "Miles Vorkosigan: The Mountains of Mourning").

There is even a popular SF&F Author (Eric Flint) ranting against DRM, whose words most of you will take directly to the heart. There is still hope as there are publishers and authors who can read the writings on the wall.

Sincerely yours, Martin

Myth:

If you buy a Kindle, you are locked into Amazon's Kindle store.

Truth:

There are many sources for books that can be read on the Kindle.

Some Free Sites (Public Domain / Creative Commons)

MobileRead.com (look for .mobi books you can download to your computer or download the MobiGuide and get your books via Whispernet) Feedbooks.com (books can be downloaded to your computer or if you download their Kindle Guide you can get your books via Whispernet - they even have a video on how to use the guide) Manybooks.net (when you download to your computer, look for Kindle format or Mobipocket) 1001Books (download books to your computer or directly from your Kindle browser)

Some Pay Sites

Fictionwise.com (look for .mobi books but NOT Secure Mobipocket books) BooksonBoard.com (register your Kindle's PID and you can download any .mobi from their Overdrive servers - to learn more about this see the Visual Kindle Guide wiki) Baen.com (great site for Sci-Fi books which offers free as well as low cost books)

So your Kindle is still somewhat useful. I would hope that more competition arises and Amazon removes its Kindle services from its e-book services so as to avoid a nasty inevitable anti-trust suit.

I can't make an argument against this attitude that is anywhere near as eloquent as Eric Flint posted on Jim Baen's free library site.

http://www.baen.com/library/

Jim put his money where his mouth was, and GAVE AWAY book, after book, after book. More, if you happen to be disabled, you can contact Baen Books, and they will give to you NOT ONLY the books from their free library, but their mainstream books that are in print.

Thanks, you reminded me to make a purchase at Baen's. If only for the principle of the thing (and I've enjoyed some of their novels, even Eric Flints' though it was an unremarkable potboiler IIRC)

I can't make an argument against this attitude that is anywhere near as eloquent as Eric Flint posted on Jim Baen's free library site.

http://www.baen.com/library/

Jim put his money where his mouth was, and GAVE AWAY book, after book, after book. More, if you happen to be disabled, you can contact Baen Books, and they will give to you NOT ONLY the books from their free library, but their mainstream books that are in print.

Baen books had a lot of money at stake on this gamble. But, they PROVED CONCLUSIVELY that giving stuff away free MAKES MONEY for them. Every time they released a title that had been out of print, sales of that book skyrocketed.

Over at Baen, the author has to approve his title for the free library, and some authors don't seem to use it. Those authors who have jumped aboard the free library enjoy an increase in income.

Baen books puts the lie to all the DRM crap, and proves the corporate lackeys to be totally wrong.

In the case of D&D stuff - if they had any brights at all, they would allow the stuff on P2P to continue, but add some cool stuff that is NOT readily downloadable via P2P. Any intelligent individual can come up with schemes for that. In fact, it would be a small step to release P2P ready material that at the very least promotes the non-P2P, and possibly even DEPENDS ON other non-P2P material.

It constantly amazes me that lackwit idiots run the corporate world.

Traveling salesmen and tinkers learned this lesson before electricity was discovered, for God's sake!!!

Why then do individuals lose ownership of intellectual property after a period of time?

Ignoring for a moment the constitutional requirement of "limited Times" that the U.S. Supreme Court appears to have chosen to disregard in Eldred v. Ashcroft:

Unlike real estate, copyright has restrictions on derivative works. If the term of copyright were perpetual, once a sufficiently large number of works have been published, every possible work would become substantially similar to something that has been copyrighted, even if only by accident, and no new works would be allowed to be published. Spider Robinson explored this issue in his short story "Melancholy Elephants".

Baen Books does this very thing, they offer 100% free, complete versions of the ebooks (high quality, in multiple formats, not shit) by any of their authors willing to participate. 43 authors choose to do so, and the vast majority of them saw a major boost in sales of their entire catalog when they did.

http://www.baen.com/library/

Eric Flint, one of the co-founders of the free program, spells it out with his own book sales. Basically, he made 85% of his money on a book of his in the first six months, another 8% or so the following six months, about 1.5% for the next year. That's when he put it online for free, and a funny thing happened. His sales doubled from the previous 6 month period, and had grown another 50% for the following period.

My money is on "pirated" music being the only thing propping the industry up right now. If they actually find a way to snuff out internet music sharing, it very well could be their downfall.

I'm WildlyGuessing* that it's only 8-10 publishers holding 75% of the market here in the US, which really isn't all that much better either.

But more importantly is the essay on this page - Baen Free Library - which talks about the limits of a 1-man op and volunteers. But if Google is doing it, and they can get Pros, that might open collaborations.

http://www.baen.com/library/

*Wild Guesses get to be semi-right, but are exempt from CitationPlease snarks.

Could anyone have predicted digital computers? Hell, could the inventors of digital computers have predicted modern desktops?

For a long time I posited that Isaac Asimov's "Multivac" was the closest anyone came to predicting the internet, but it turns out that Murray Leinster wrote a story in 1946 named A Logic Named Joe that predicted, and fairly accurately, personal computers (called "logics" in the story) and the internet. Like the real internet of today, it had ISPs (called "tanks" in the story).

The only two things he got wrong was a lack of user-generated content, and censorship.

I got Joe, after Laurine nearly got me. You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made--an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country--an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense.

Logics are all right, though. They changed civilization, the highbrows tell us. All on accounta the Carson Circuit. And Joe shoulda been a perfectly normal logic, keeping some family or other from wearin' out its brains doin' the kids' homework for 'em.

The whole story is at the link.

OK, don't get me wrong. I used to be a professional Perl programmer and think Perl is useful for a lot of things. The most recent time I made significant use of the "Swiss army chainsaw" is to write a program to split up the large .html files one gets from free ebooks over at baen.com and make them small enough to be usable with my cell phone's built-in html reader:

http://maradns.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-on-nokia-5310-xpressmusic.html

I also still use Perl as a "sed on steroids" when I can't be buggered to figure out how to make a given regex Perl-compatible, such as this real-world example:

perl -pe 's/[0-9]+\/DwMain//;s/\s*//g'

I also have had the privilege of meeting and having dinner with Larry Wall; a very kind person with a very deep and strong faith in God which I respect.

The issue I have with Perl is that it's too big to use in the really embedded space that busybox really thrives in, and is too big to, say, come with the version of MSYS I use. (MSYS is a subset of *NIX for Windows systems that I use when I want the basics of *NIX on a client's Windows machine but don't want to waste time putting Cygwin on their system). My other issue is that Perl code can more easily become unmaintainable "spaghetti code" if there isn't a strong coding style in place and enforced; these days I prefer to use Python when I know a given script is going to be pretty big. Also, Perl's big use when I was a professional Perl programmer, being an excellent cgi-bin language, has by and large been superseded by PHP these days. [1] [2]

Anyway, I don't hate Perl. I still use it; I just feel these days for small stuff sh/awk/sed/etc. make more sense, PHP makes more sense for web monkey applications, and Python (or Java) make more sense for big scripting projects.

[1] Back when I was a Perl pro, I used it mainly for things like data mining and email processing, but that's neither here or there and from a long time ago.

[2] There is, of course, mod-perl, used very notably by Slashdot. There's also mod-python.

"Why do you choose to state it in a way that makes it look like publishers are greedy?" Have you bought any college text books? Some publishers ARE greedy. Not all, of course, but some most definitely are. http://www.baen.com/library/

in order to help promote authors and series all available in many formats including kindle and RTF

you and the publishers are not only wrong, but in the publishers' case, possibly terminally wrong. Actually, I'm not wrong, you're looking in the wrong places for the wrong thing. And then you go off to mention Asimov? No surprise you've missed the point that publishers have to make to remain afloat...

If you read what he wrote, you will see that he was talking about Asimov _at the beginning of his career_. Nowadays Asimov is recognised as one of the greats, but at the time he was just another struggling author.

It's fucking *Asimov*! No shit it doesn't take strong arm techniques to keep authors like Asimov profitable but what do you do about the other 99.9% of what sits on the shelf at your local Borders? What about non-pleasure reading? Or are you telling me that the books I find on The Pirates Bay are all non-sales anyway? That's a joke of an excuse. And don't get me wrong, free samples? Sure, that can move books but how do you sell something if all of it is available for free? I'm not saying that the model doesn't work for some under certain circumstances but it doesn't work with the current numbers of the market. That's the difference.

If you think this, you are mistaken. Baen have been running a very successful experiment for years. After disccions with Jim Baen, Eric Flint started the Free Library and put some of his books up. When he received his next royalty statement he noticed that receipts for the books he had put up _increased_. If you read his "Prime Palavers" he gives a good explanation of why DRM will fail for boos, as it has for RIAA and MIAA.

Baen Free Library http://www.baen.com/library/ Will that link do for you? (read the intro)

If so, please provide a profitable business model that they can follow.

Everyone knows the model. Stop wasting money or DRM development, and sell DRM free books.

You see, the key word there is "sell". They still sell books, and thus still get money.

Some people will loan out books, sure. But that gets other people interested in the author and then everyone makes more money than if they hide content behind an impenetrable wall with a tiny gate. People will pay if costs are reasonable and material is good.

See, Baen Books

Another excellent write up on the subject by Eric Flint can be found at Jim Baen's free library. (along with some free sci-fi and fantasy books-I can personally recommend anything from there-I've read them all)

Have a look at Baen books: They publish everything also as downloadable without any DRM (HTML/RTF/PDF) and you can buy months (4-6 books) or individual books. Individual books cost about the paperback price, a month costs about twice that. You typically also get the first 1/3 of a book as fee sample. They also have a "free library" where you get older books in the same formats entirely for free.

Eric Flint coordinates the free library. He has a series of postings on the effect and it seems to be very postive, with older books suddenly producing significat income for the authors, which they did not before.

Of course this only works for good quality books, but for them it works. I found myself buying more and trying authors I would otherwise have overlooked.

References:
http://www.baen.com/
http://www.baen.com/library/

Have a look at Baen books: They publish everything also as downloadable without any DRM (HTML/RTF/PDF) and you can buy months (4-6 books) or individual books. Individual books cost about the paperback price, a month costs about twice that. You typically also get the first 1/3 of a book as fee sample. They also have a "free library" where you get older books in the same formats entirely for free.

Eric Flint coordinates the free library. He has a series of postings on the effect and it seems to be very postive, with older books suddenly producing significat income for the authors, which they did not before.

Of course this only works for good quality books, but for them it works. I found myself buying more and trying authors I would otherwise have overlooked.

References:
http://www.baen.com/
http://www.baen.com/library/

This nutjob has apparently been learning RIAA tactics, but not noticing the consequences.

I hope he realizes[heh heh, yeah right] that the harder he throws this boomerang, the harder it's going to smack him when it comes back around at him.

The best comment on writers dealing with the digital world I've read so far, has been by a successful writer himself. (one of my top 10 authors)

Here is what Eric Flint has to say[excerpt from link]:

Baen Books is now making available -- for free -- a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online -- no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Alles in ordnung!

I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy -- while it is definitely illegal and immoral -- is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market -- especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people -- is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

It makes for an interesting read, seeing things from an author's perspective.

*shameless plug*: some of my favorite authors I have found on Jim Baen's site. Lots of free stuff, and an easy way to buy the non free stuff, almost all books have sample chapters on line, good prices (books usually start at $4 USD), cheap subscription plan(monthly fee-read 'til your eyes bleed), etc.

The only time I buy an actual, physical book is when I'm flying somewhere. (usually once every 3-4 years)

http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm for the original.

There was an article on slashdot several months back about a study that showed that overall those who downloaded the most illegal music, also spent the most on buying music. The argument on slashdot was over whether they bought more music because they downloaded more, or if they just consumed more music.
I have also seen articles from Baen Books that they have seen an increase in book sales since they started having their authors put a certain number of each author's titles available for free for electronic download http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

Speaking as the owner of one of the oldest SF-specialized literary agencies in the country, and as someone who is quite interested in protecting author's rights for all the obvious reasons, I think Aiken has fallen off the cognitive cliff, and that he does no one - not authors, not consumers, not publishers - any favors by pushing this over-the-top interpretation of what an "audio performance" is.

Absolutely. For the perspective of an author who gets it, read this

Or the Bean Free Library. http://www.baen.com/library/ Also a good place for authors starting out.

Reading a book is a very different experience than reading something online. It requires a greater commitment/attention span, and the reward in return is a greater understanding of the subject (for non-fiction) or immersion in the story (for fiction). This is assuming the books are good, of course.

I read books online at both the Baen free library http://www.baen.com/library/ and Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/. Other than being able to click directly to the chapter I'm at, and to scroll instead of turn the page, I don't consider it a "very different" experience. Perhaps you meant that short-form reading -magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, cereal boxes- is a very different experience from long-form reading. And most web material tends toward essays, articles and short blurbs. There's nothing about the words being displayed as pixels rather than blobs of ink that makes for a different experience, at least for me. I understand that some people find it more difficult to focus on a screen for long periods compared to paper. But then again, some people find glossy laptop screens to be annoying as well.

Seems to work fine for the book authors whose works are here:

http://www.baen.com/library/

In a world where the people with money have increasing ways to spend it, you are competing in mind share terms. If you are just starting out, you are a grain of sand on a beach. Even if you are actually a diamond, who would know?

So either you buy advertising and marketing ($$$$$), or you give stuff out free and hope that lots of people like it and tell their friends, and eventually you get something like a network effect.

Just look at the popular music and books out there. A some of them aren't really that good - it's just they are good (lucky? ;) ) enough, and then people talk about them and it becomes part of their shared experience, and so some of them will buy for themselves or for others.

Note though, if you can only create one decent work in your entire life, then giving away that only golden egg you lay isn't going to make you much money. But that just means you're not very good at that, and you should be finding a different way of earning a living.

If I can only paint one excellent picture in my whole lifetime, I shouldn't try to make money as an artist. Maybe just paint as a hobby.

Another thing: make it easy for people to pay you. Doesn't matter how they get your stuff - whether it's from P2P or from someone else's trash.

Someone had a pirate copy of GTA3, and enjoyed it so much that he wanted to buy one - but it was banned in his country. He actually went to a neighbouring country to try to buy it, but it was banned there too!

Would have been better if there was a website where he could just pay the money and not worry about shipping charges. He already has the game why pay for shipping? He's paid the "unauthorised distributors" their share - which presumably includes shipping, handling, distribution, stocking etc.

See the Baen Free Library.

I think we are nearing some sort of "singularity" as the number of stories about real science invading what was until recently only Science fiction becomes common place

It's been that way since I learned to read 50 years ago. Actually since way before - in 1946 before there were computer screens or keyboards, when computers were programmed with solder and plugs, and their output was simply lights turned on or off and there were less than half dozen in the world, Murray Leinster wrote A Logic Named Joe that foretold personal computers, computer keyboards, computer screens, the internet, and client-server technology.

The old 1964 Star Trek foretold flat screened voice activated computers, talking computers, self-opening doors, cell phones, space shuttles, etc.

Some inventions seem to have never been foretold, afaik nobody had a replacement lens for the eye that would cure age related presbyopia (Dr. McCoy couldn't cure Kirk in Star Trek IV).

Even in the 19th century, Jules Verne foretold a visit to the moon, and although his astronauts were shot out of a cannon, there is much in From The Earth To The Moon that mirrors Apollo 11 in many ways.

I looked it up on wikipedia and found that A Logic Named Joe is posted on the internet, with a link from wikipedia.

The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made--an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country--an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense.

It appears that Leinster beat Asimov to the punch; it's possible, being a science fiction fan before he was a science fiction writer, that Asimov even read "Joe". Wikipedia puts "Joe" at 1946, but Multivac in 1955.

Janis Ian claimed quite the opposite in an article from all the way back in 2002: It's the "biggest selling artists", if anyone, who are to be concerned about sharing - the "average" band/artist hardly receives money from their label but gets a lot more exposure (and thus income) from shared music.

Then again, that is more-or-less also the argument behind the existence of the Baen Free Library in the first place, where this article is hosted. Go check it out if you like SF.