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I warmly welcome any initiative that makes more and more books, or parts thereof, available online.

I used to think, like many people, that ebooks just didn't work because 'I like the feel of paper under my fingers'. Since I bought a PDA and discovered the joys of Fictionwise, I just can't go back to these clumsy wood pulp apparels.

Amazon is pretty progressive in this regard, making a great number of their collection available electronically. It was probably fairly easy from there to make their stock searchable. And how I wish the MPAA and RIAA could work like the publishing industry...

The existence of ebooks is NOT threatening traditional books, because people see more value in a printed book over an electronic copy. This is clearly not the case with a CD and a DVD, since most people couldn't care less about the jacket if they have the goods on the CD/DVD. I wish the MPAA and RIAA would understand how to make traditional CDs and DVDs "value-added", and make people less inclined to getting a computer file instead of shelling out the money.

Then again, I guess the case with ebooks is that your typical DVD or CD pirate is just not interested in swapping files to get the latest Stephen King and read it on screen. Not only that, but most of History's greatest books are available for free, and one could probably read free books for the rest of their lives if they chose so.

And for legitimate, low-cost ebooks (half of which are unrestricted and available in many formats) and publishing opportunities, hie thee to Fictionwise.

Yes, I'm sure that for you, in your current circumstances and with current equipment, they're a no-go. But must you assume that it applies equally to everyone, in all circumstances, and for the foreseeable future too?

I'm a case in point: over the last couple of years, I've read far more onscreen than off. (And that's not due to having nothing else to read.) Why? I find it more convenient, for a number of reasons:

• It's there. I carry my pocket computer (a Psion 5mx) around with me anyway; I don't have to remember to pick up my latest reading material, and make extra space for it.
• Backlight. I can read in bed, or elsewhere at night, without needing a light.
• Bookmarks and other conveniences. I always lose physical bookmarks; when I don't use them, it sometimes takes a while to remember where I got up to. My reader app keeps track for me.
• Formatting and anglicisation. With physical books, I'm stuck with the spellings and mistakes that they're printed with; but I can edit ebooks and convert them to British English spelling, etc.
• Cut'n'paste. I don't have to retype quotes &c if I want to refer to them.
• Font size. Depending on the conditions, I can adjust the font size &c to match. For dead-tree books, the only `zoom mode' you have is to move your head closer to the object...
• Library size. I currently carry nearly a thousand books and stories with me, so I'm never stuck for anything. I really wouldn't want to try that with dead-tree editions.
• Cheapness. I read some stuff that's out of copyright and available for free (e.g. via Gutenberg). I also have many files purchased from Fictionwise, which is substantially cheaper than buying in dead-tree form. (I'm not admitting to having files of more dubious origin, too...)
• Searching. If I have vague memories of having read something, or want to check back, I can do a straight text search.

(BTW, I've never read anything on my Psion in the bath, but you might be interested to know that Douglas Adams actually wrote in the bath! Incidentally, on an older Psion model.)

Now, I'm specifically not saying that these advantages apply to everyone. I'm sure they don't. But that's exactly the point: neither do your disadvantages. Isn't it enough that some people like ebooks?

Well, I for one do. Of course, I don't buy them from Barnes and Noble. In fact, until this article, I was not aware they sold ebooks.

I mostly buy ebooks from Fictionwise, though I do have accounts elsewhere.

This is exactly why I only buy unencrypted e-books and sci-fi magazines from Fictionwise

Their Multiformat books are available as:
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) for Macintosh and PCs
Palm DOC (PDB) for Palm compatible devices
Palm iSilo (PDB) for Palm compatible devices
Microsoft Reader (LIT) for PC and PocketPC devices
Franklin eBookman (FUB) for Franklin eBookMan devices
Hiebook (KML) for Hiebook devices
Mobipocket (PRC) (currently available for Palm, PocketPC, and Franklin eBookman devices)
Rocket (RB) for Rocket and REB/1100

I think I have a faily good chance of being able to read at least one of those formats in a few years time, and unencrypted Acrobat files can be transcoded into html easily.

Please note: Even though these books are not protected I have bought over a hundred books and short stories here and mysteriously failed to put them on kazaa or even give copies to my friends.

I am (shock horror for SCO, RIAA etc) both an open source programmer and I support copyright. Without copyright the GPL is meaningless.

close, but it was The Fourth Profession, which appeared in N-Space. It was also one of my personal favorite Niven short stories.

Lack of e-book support? I read e-books on my Zaurus all the time (I also blog, code, do network troubleshooting for clients, and do image editing on my digicam pics from it as well, but that's beside the point)! Try QTReader (a.k.a Opie-reader), a very full featured ebook reader with auto-scrolling, screen rotation support, Unicode, and more, which will read just about anything, Aportis "Doc", plain text, weasel/ztxt, gzipped text, Plucker compressed html and its own very highly compressed format.

What it *can't* read is proprietary eBook formats, but that's not the Zaurus' fault, it has the neccesary hardware to run it, but the people who make the readers for those formats haven't bothered to make Zaurus versions of their reader programs. It's the same problem as Palm not being able to read some Microsoft Reader formats, and PocketPC's not being able to read certain Palm formats. The problem is not with the Z, but with eBook publishers not releasing their books in formats that are cross-platform readable, and in not releasing readers for their formats for all platforms. But there's still a buttload of eBooks that come in non proprietary formats (and I'm not just talking abotu Project Gutenberg stuff, go check out FictionWise, where a good chunk (I'd say maybe half) of their books are available in unencrypted formats that are easily readable on a Zaurus, real books by real authors.

And on a geekier note, most of their encrypted books are available on Adobe Reader format, which is available for the Palm, and the Zaurus can run a Palm emulator, so, if you're truly hell-bent on reading those on the Zaurus, well.. I don't think I need to spell it out for the Slashdot crowd. :)

1. I can read ebooks while I eat a sandwich. Sounds minor, but really, I like to read while I eat lunch, and a PDA stays open and flat and changing the page is trivial.

2. I can read them in the dark- in the car at night (when somebody *else* is driving, of course) or in bed without bothering my wife.

3. I can fit several ebook novels in my pocket. This means that I can have a book with me wherever I go. I can read a book standing in line at McDonald's, or at the bank, or while I'm sitting in the car waiting for my wife to come out of work.

4. They're cheaper. You can get a lot of books, especially classic literature, for free, and even current, popular ebooks cost less, so I can read more for less money. On the downside, if you don't have a PDA already you have to buy some kind of a reader.

5. I can download the sequel to a book I like at any time. At bookstores I used to buy books 1 and 2 or 1, 2, and 3 of a series I like, but now I buy just the first one online, and if I like it I can download #2 and have it in less than a minute if I liked the first one.

6. I can get back-order or out-of-print books more easily. Regular bookstores nessarily have limited space. Buying paper books online requires me to wait until they arrive in the mail.

So while they're not perfect, I find that I read ebook novels more and more and paper ones less and less.

As for copy protection and book formats, you can buy a lot of ebooks with no protection at all in any of multiple formats. Check out http://www.baen.com or http://www.fictionwise.com for examples- that's where I buy many of my ebooks.

Of course, the benefits of open formats aren't limited to being able to use them on any platform. For example, I can convert American spelling to British, fix errors, improve the typography with smart quotes, add automatic bookmarks, &c. And I can easily quote sections in correspondence.

And to all the folks who are saying "I don't like reading ebooks, therefore they're crap," just remember that different folks have different preferences. Personally, for a long time I've read more on the screen of my Psion than I do on paper. I find that once you get into a story, you become less aware of the medium (just as you don't have to stop and think about turning the pages of a dead-tree book). The backlight means I don't have to have good lighting, and can even read in the dark! And provided you pick a suitable font, I find it easy enough on the eyes. Another advantage is that I always have my library with me. (About 50MB of books.) I don't need to carry my current book with me, or plan ahead.

I'm not saying that they're for everyone, just don't assume that they're dying simply because you don't like them.

And there's a lot of bookwares out there if you know where to look. (Mainly Gnutella, though if anyone knows any other sources please let us know!) Plus quite a bit of legal stuff you can buy at places like Fictionwise. (They let you download in many formats; plain text isn't one, but it's trivial to convert PalmDOC to plain text.)

• It's universal. Everything supports it, from PDAs to supercomputers.
• It's versatile. If properly formatted, it's reflowable on different screen sizes, fonts, layouts, &c. And it's perfect for other access methods.
• It supports most characters you'd find in books. The de facto standard is the Windows Latin-1 encoding, which has all the punctuation as well as accented characters. (Yes, I know, I know. But it's not just on Windows -- both my Mac and my Psion use it, for example.)
• It's editable. There are tons of tools already available, from spell-checkers in editors to complex analysis. I've written some of my own, for instance; one converts from American to British spelling, which is how I like to read my books.
• It has conventions for /italics/, *bold*, _underlining_, &c. Yes, at first, these may look clumsy, but I actually prefer them in many ways, as they're more precise; for example, you can differentiate between *word* *by* *word* and *all at once* highlighting (see the Jargon File for the difference).
• It's compact. Plain text files are smaller than HTML, PDF, RTF &c, sometimes by a lot; and when compressed in formats like PalmDOC (pdb) or TCR, they can be made even smaller and still usable directly.
• It's future-proof. Plain text has been around for decades, and will be with us for many more, long after DRM keys have been lost and proprietary apps have died.

Yes, of course some spiffy new format will have other advantages. But it's unlikely to gain quick acceptance. Plain text documents are everywhere, as are readers and other software. There are even online publishers selling text files. In fact, ASCII text is arguably the most successful electronic standard there is!

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, read The Fourth Profession.

Google found a site where you can buy an e-book of it. They have an excerpt, too. Putting a line from the excerpt into google turned up a couple sites with a full copy. The first one doesn't work anymore, but google has it cached. I found another site that has all stories from the Neutron Star collection in one text file.

I believe Classical.com does not penalize for small purchases - how, I don't know.

I second that recommendation for Bujold, especially the entire Vorkosigan series. The Curse of Chalion is fine, but not as much of a romp as the Vorkosigan books.

The books are swashbuckling adventure in space. They are more *fun* than any other science fiction I've ever read.

As science fiction it is a little bit retro; that is to say, not very futuristic by modern standards. Bujold's books, while they have some genetic engineering and (if I recall) a little cyberthechnology here and there, aren't heavy into any future technology except for various star-trek-esque space weapons, and superluminal travel (which is accomplished via wormholes that have strategic importance.)

The principal charm of the books is in their titular protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan, who is native to a savage, feudal, backwater planet only recently reintroduced to modern technology, and is very physically frail. He compensates by being manic and charismatic.

There is no need to read the books in order, except for the most recent ones.

While I can't recommend authors (I generally don't notice until about the fifth book or so) my sources for new reading material these days are mostly online. I would recomend checking out Baen Books (including of course the famous Baen Free Library) and Fictionwise. Both have extensive SciFi collections, and while I won't say that the quality is all good, they both also have at least decent samples. (Baen's, of course, are better than decent.) You may not want to read they way I do (I do a lot of reading on my Clie), but both also offer several formats, including at least defacto standards.

Yes, the Movie and Music folks would like to mandate security with government intervention, wacky-doodle encryption schemes, and other such nonsense, but that doesn't mean that those of us fighting to maintain our rights should shed tears for crackers and pirates that get caught and prosecuted.

Personally I think that there is a world of difference between the guy in Norway that wrote DeCSS so that he could view legally purchased DVDs on his Linux box and the masses of folks pirating copyrighted works via KaZaa and the like. I am perfectly willing to pay for content, but I am not willing to give up my fair use rights.

The irony of the situation is that there are publishers, musicians, and probably even movie producers that are willing to meet us halfway. I have bought quite a few ebooks from Baen and Fictionwise that were available in several unencrypted formats, and there are plenty of musicians that are willing to let you download samples of their music for free, and are also happy to produce CDs that will play on your computer.

The real trick is to force the market in the direction you prefer by supporting the efforts of those that respect your fair use rights. People that copy copyrighted material illegaly are simply strengthening the argument of the people that say that government intervention and strong cryptography is required.

Oh, and make sure you vote, and also make sure to check the voting record of your elected officials. You might be surprised.

Because you're buying it from leeches (it's the same at Amazon, BTW).

Go to fictionwise, for example, or (cheaper but limited to a single publisher) Baen's webscriptions.

Linux folks can read eBooks right now. Heck, I have read over 60 of them in the past year alone, and I have a real problem with a program that unencrypts Microsoft's eBooks. The reason for this is simple. The last thing I want to do is increase sales of Microsoft eBooks. Right now the eBook industry is finally coming to the conclusion that encryption doesn't do anything but hurt its profits. There are plenty of places where I can get unencrypted eBooks, and I would just as soon send the publishers the message that the best way to sell their eBooks is to release them in a wide variety of unencrypted formats. If you don't believe me check out Baen, or most books at Fictionwise.

This software is the worst possible reflection on the eBook community. Not only does it make us all seem like thieves, but the pornographic element makes us look like degenerates as well.

I have an older version by Rocket and love it. But, I understand from discussion groups one can't put web pages on them anymore? Book vendor support seems to be more shakey (Amazon and B&N used to carry almost everything in REB format), but Fictionwise has a great selection.

Yup, exactly the same. I tend to use Amazon and Fictionwise to buy my books, the latter has a heavy sci-fi leaning.

I also play chess on mine. Mine's a Toshiba e570 PPC, which has CFII slot for which I plan to buy a 802.11b card as soon as my local cafes start a wireless browsing service (Wellington, New Zealand) which I understand is in the works. Then hopefully I'll be able to play chess over the net while drinking my latte :-)

I've also used it to go online (when I was in the UK) to check my email using the IR link on my Siemens S35 cellphone - slow but workable.

I'd quite like to be able to use it at work, but we use Windows NT 4 (bleugh) which has no USB support and the serial link sucks. Worse, we use Novell GroupWise - probably the worst piece of arse email/groupware product on the face of the earth - which does not sync to my PPC.

Clearly, none of these are true. Many people like to read ebooks; I'm one. Enough people are buying them to keep sites like Fictionwise going. And yet dead-tree books aren't going away; each format has its own advantages and disadvantages - the important thing is for people to have the choice.

Personally, I much prefer an (open) electronic format. I can keep a library on my palmtop, taking up no extra physical space at all, and have access to reading matter and reference material whether at home, in my lunch hour, on the train, on holiday, or wherever. I can search, cut-and-paste quotations, and easily use long-term bookmarks. Plus I can edit the text as necessary (for example, I've developed a program to Anglicise US spellings, which really annoy me - try that with a dead-tree edition!) My library's about ½GB, mostly compressed.

Of course, I'm in a minority; many folks find palmtop screens or even monitors inappropriate for that sort of reading. And that's fine. But I hope they'll appreciate that some others find them useful.

Joke if you want, but I can fill in 2 for you:
1. free books
2. free books act as gateway drug for non-free ebooks.
3. PROFIT!!!

It happened to me. When paperbacks started costing > 9 dollars, I stopped buying them. It hurt to decrease my favorite entertainment, but with my scifi/fantasy appetite of 2-4 paperbacks a weekend, I just couldn't afford it.

Then I heard fictionwise was giving away hugo and nebula award nominees. How could I resist? I downloaded them all. After spending a happy hour tweaking Weasel Reader, I settled in with my Palm to devour some words.

I was like the recovered junky, who, having one hit, falls deep into addiction again. But I still wasn't going to pay 9 bucks for a paperback, or worse, the same amount for an ebook. I trolled Project Gutenberg, Baen, OReilly look for a good read. That held off the monkey on my back for a little while. Still I needed more. So I went back to fictionwise, credit card in hand, looking for my fix. I discovered that unlike some ebookstores (cough,cough Peanut Press) not all ebooks were overpriced, DRM'd e-versions of last years NYT bestseller list. fictionwise has TONS of great novels cheap. Real cheap. In text format. Did I mention cheap? And even better: novellas, short stories, serials, all manner of quickie escapism that fit perfectly into the time it takes to ride the bus, or watch your clothes dry.

So now I'm hooked on cheapie short stories from fictionwise. On Friday nights I used to go down to the Blockbuster and rent 9 dollars worth of DVDs for my weekend entertainment. Now I spend a fun hour browsing an ebookstore, and for 4 dollars (0.30 - 1.50 each) I download a half-dozen good stories to fill my free time.

Black hole? Geez, where have these people been? Everyone knows that the galaxy's core exploded years ago!

Please feel free to mail me corrections and additions to the timeline. The vast majority of it was not written by me, it was written by others who submitted material.

About the "origin" of FRP. I think Dunsany is a good addition to the "Tolkien Synoptic" view of fantasy origins, but to be honest, Dungeons and Dragons and much of the urban- and dungeon-based fantasy material around today owes much of its genesis to Fritz Leiber and his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser "sword and sorcery" series (a phrase he coined). Oh, and Moorcock with the Eternal Champion series. Tolkien's stuff was just too damn full of *elves* and floppy ears and singing -- Leiber and Moorcock wrote convincingly about *people* in fantastic situations.

For one thing, I doubt they even have them all electronically. Most of her works were published before the start of Webscription.

Now if only they will do the same with Lois McMaster Bujold's "Miles Vorkosigan" series (also publish by Baen), I'll be a VERY happy girl.

The early Bujold works (including the books Falling Free and Ethan of Athos that others in this thread have mentioned wanting) are available at www.fictionwise.com. Combine this with several of the newer works that are available on Baen's www.webscription.net site, and there's just a few in the middle that are not currently available in ebook format. The latest WebScription setup even lets you buy individual books instead of a monthly bundle of books, if you prefer that.

I'm certainly hoping that the gaps in the Bujold ebook availability will get closed in before too long has passed, but I haven't heard if this is planned or not.

For those that haven't read any of Lois's work, you can get one of her short stories for free at the Baen Free Library -- The Mountains of Mourning. I heartily recommend it.

Fictionwise.com is a very profitable ebook company (you read right) that uses micropayments.

Not true, check out Fictionwise, which claims to be profitable. I think one key is that the content cost less than a dead-tree book would, but Fictionwise actually charges as much and gets away with it. I'm hoping to publish some content there if I can write something that doesn't suck. ;-)

I think the thing that most hurt William's efforts was the $17.99 price tag. That was too steep.

I would venture to suggest that the main reason dedicated e-book devices haven't taken off is that there isn't all that much you can do with them other than read an e-book...and in some cases, you can't even read any e-book you want, only the ones you buy from the manufacturer. Thanks, but no thanks.

Now PDAs, on the other hand, have a zillion uses...including e-reading. And those have shot right through the roof sale-wise, and there are apparently enough people who enjoy e-reading on them to keep at least a half-dozen major and who knows how many minor PDA-compatible or PDA-only e-book vending sites in clover.

For instance, I've been in correspondence with Lee Fyock of PDA-only e-book site Palm Digital Literature (nee Peanut Press), and while he can't reveal figures, he can tell me that business has been very good. Note that Peanut has been around for several years now, is adding new titles and authors constantly, and has been viewed as such a desirable property that it's been bought out not once but twice, the second time by Palm itself! That doesn't sound like strictly a publisher's dream to me.

I don't see Peanut, or Alexlit, or Fictionwise , or Baen Webscription, or any of the others as being in any danger of shutting down soon. So, clearly, there's more to this e-book thing than some people seem to think.

(Oh, and as for e-books being strictly a vehicle to impose content control, that's not necessarily entirely true either. See the Baen Free Library, Prime Palaver #6.)

To be fair (if somewhat nit picky) in the book people found that the aging process was directly tied to sleeping (So they didn't age because they didn't sleep).

It's fair, I was picking a nit too...mostly just so I could being up the sequel. Somehow I don't think the real drug will be found to eliminate/signifigantly retard the aging process...plus I'm not positave being turned sleepless after your brain had finished devloping had the same side effects in the book...

And it has a sequel?!? Cool, thanks for bring that to my attention. I'll have to look for that.

If you like reading PDF files (or palmdoc) I'm pretty sure it is on Fictionwise for a bit cheaper then the printed matter...of corse I would rather have the print version, but it is the easiest way to find short fiction by Nancy Kress and...er, whomever wrote Garden of Iden...

So, if I understand your argument correctly, you're saying access to the discarded photos devalue the best shot because the discards (regardless of number) are sufficiently close to the best shot. You fear this means in 10 years people won't want to pay for the good shot when they can get a 'close enough' discard for much less money.

Yes, the "best" discards end up being slightly different angles, slightly warmer or cooler shots, or slightly darker or more exposed, or have just a little too much or little too little motion blur. In many cases the discards could be almost as good as the chosen shot to a different photo editor, and to most of the public at large they are all good shots. Think of it this way, you are shooting a white church steeple in golden light on slide film. You shoot two rolls (72 frames) to reduce the chance of bad film or processing wrecking your work (you only get two chances at shooting in golden light, the 15 to 30 min around sunrise, and the 15 to 30 around sunset so you don't want to let the lab waste it!). Now how many different useful ways are they to shoot the thing? Not 72, I've tried.

You end up with near duplicates because there are only so many ways to do it. They are not true duplicates because you have things like trees used as framing elements that are in slightly different places, so it can be proved which is the published image and which is the "abandoned" image.

Assuming I have that correctly (a shortcoming of discussing something in this fashion, I'm not trying to railroad you into defending against my incorrect interpretation) I can think of an easy way to allay your fears: don't publish the discards until the copyright term on the published shot (and thus its exclusive market) has expired.

How does that improve things? It still has been unavialble to the public, still abandoned. The only thing that changes is who can get it. Your lab can. Your photo assistants can. Your cleaning staff can (and in any of these cases I'm not talking about theft, you can use a slide duplicator). If use a digital camera (or scan your slides) you also have to worry about the old backups (say when you copy over the CD-Rs once a year because you don't want to be stuck with a bad one...three years worth is safe, 10 years worth is a lot of extra bulk!), or if you send the CDs out to be copied because someone else has a dup'er that takes stacks of CDs which is a lot cheaper then paying your assistant $6.75 an hour to swap them by hand...

That doesn't even get to the issue of the photo editors that want to see your "10 best" so they can pick the "one best" (not uncommon, since the final selection really is a matter of taste...and sometimes a matter of what headlines they want to fit in and where they fit on your photo!). They are going to buy and publish one image, but they tend to want exclusive rights on the whole set, plus anything that is "too similar" (you don't see Antoine Verglas selling a picture of Molly Sims in a red bikini on white fur to FHM and the same pose of Molly but in a pink bikini to Maxim do you?).

Speaking of Molly Sims (well, not her, more like the unknown models) it is common for small time models to take prints as part or all of their payment. They have restricted use of them (normally they can only be used in a portfolio which they use to get more work). You normally show them a few good images and let them pick which they like. Those may not be the same shots of the model that the magazine wants to buy, so in ten years the copyright would revert and not only does your model have the images, any other photographer that she tried to model for may have made a copy! Here copyright is not only protecting you, but her!

Oh, on to the nudes...

Then don't get them developed at a place you can't trust to honor your wishes. Self-developing film is a great way to accomplish this. This scenario doesn't strike me as a copyright issue because people who make these kinds of photos (hello Laura Schlessinger!) don't want them published at all regardless of when the copyright on them expires.

You can barely trust the places that are out there now with copyright to help you, without it you have a huge problem (Ok "barely" is taring Descrite Color Labs with the same brush that Walmart so richly deserves).

Self-developing would be fine, if we all liked B&W film and had a decent light tight changing bag and another $100 worth of crap. Some of us don't (or lose the film spool when we try to hook it onto the tank's leads). More over most people would far rather have color, and frankly home processing color sucks, is hard, and probably causes cancer. I only know one person that does it and I know a lot of photographers! (this guy is a former chemist, or at least that was a former hobby)

But there are ways to address both copyright and privacy concerns: use a film you control completely: digital cameras are quickly entering the norm, self-developing physical film like the older "Big Swinger" camera film or more modern color Polaroid camera film have decades of acceptability behind them.

So because we strip copyright from non-published works (well after ten years) you either have low res images (most digitals don't look so hot at 8x10, let alone the 16x20 good film on a tripod with a good lens can do), cheap ameaturish infinite depth of field (until you get to the $1400 to $2500 EOS-D30 or Fuji S1 the CCDs on digi cams are too physically small to do selective focus), or you have to pay a ton of money (for the Canon or Fuji DSLR) which may not take your lenses (if you shoot Leica, Contax, Pentax, Minolta, Oly, rangefinders, medium or large format cameras...). Oh, or you are limited to the relitavly poor res and bad color pallettes of Polaroid or Fuji instant films?

This abandonment provision may have problems but I don't think the particular counterarguments you've raised convince me that abandonment provisions are a bad idea.

You didn't cover game balance issues in things like Magic.

I didn't cover items that are delibratly produced in limited quantities in order to keep them profitable, like photos from most photographers that only go for $200 to $300 nicely framed in limited editions of 100 or 1000. Make them unlimited and they probably only go for $10-30 over the cost of the frame, and trust me these people just don't sell enough as it is.

This abandonment provision may have problems but I don't think the particular counterarguments you've raised convince me that abandonment provisions are a bad idea.

Oh, I think they are a great idea, if we can identify all the holes and fix them without making it too complex, and too easy to bypass.

For example if we made abandonment apply only to non-limited run mass market items to get around it new books would be in "limited runs" of 500 million or other numbers above their possible sales run. It is hard to make the rules simple (to reduce unexpected loopholes), fair, and hard to avoid.

I admit I like the abandonment idea because I wouldn't want to deprive the public of works the publisher has chosen to let 'go out of print' (or go out of publication, regardless of medium).

I'm with you. I want to be able to buy Kadge Baker's out of print stories (of corse she seems to be a fictonwise author, so I probably will be able to sooner or later, even so there are other authors I like that aren't. I want to buy CDs from bands that are gone. I want legal copies of my beloved childhood video games for MAME. I would love to examine the source for MacOS 1.0 just as closely as I have seen V6 Unix's (with the help of Jim Lions)...

...I just don't want to destroy collectable card games, small time art photographers, small to medium time stock and freelance PJ shooters, and a host of other creative artists that I don't know squat about!

• Alexlit
  
• Mind's Eye
  
• Peanut Press/Palm Digital Literature
  
• Fictionwise
  
• MemoWare
  
• Baen Webscriptions/Free Library

Larry Niven wrote about exactly the same thing 17 years before in The Hole Man - it earned him a Hugo Award to (spoiler) postulate that a black hole dropped into Mars would oscillate back and forth through the planet until it eventually all was eaten up and entered the singularity.

Aside from content availability and format concerns, the other obstacle to e-books is handheld technology. Laptops are simply too big, cumbersome, and short-lived to be effective readers. The current crop of Palm devices are barely useable as readers due to poor screen resolution (speaking from experience with a Visor Platinum), although the iPaq type devices and Sony CLIE both look somewhat better. What I'm waiting for, though, is the webpad type device with at least a 640x480 color screen, Linux, less than 1 in. thick, a decent processor, and at least 8 hour battery life between charges. Now *THAT* will be a usable ebook reader!!! :-)

186,282 mi/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

I disagree. If the publishers released their books in plaintext or HTML, the effects would be disastrous.

Really? Ever been to Fiction Wise? They have a ton of stuff, mostly SF short stories, but some novels. Mostly oldish (5+ years), some not.

It's in your choice of plain text, PDF, PalmDoc, and some others. You can even download any book you have bought as many times as you like (in case you want to change formats, or deleted your old copy).

I found a number of Kage Baker stories I had never read, and a few Larry Niven stories I decided I should own in electronic form. I payed real money.

I haven't noticed the collapse of the publishing industry. Not even the SF shorts part of it. But maybe I haven't been watching?

I have been buying (yes *buying*) eBooks from Fictionwise

These nice people supply a range of ebooks in Palm DOC format, PDF, Rocket, eBookMan and Microsoft Reader. Not encrypted. You can download any or all of these formats for books you have bought.

I only buy eMagazines of short shelf life from eBook suppliers (like palm) that sell me encrypted books

I have over 150 ebooks on my HandEra 330 compact flash card which I read during the odd minutes in queues, in taxis, wherever. The higher res screen makes them much easier on the eyes.

And the reader is very nice for travelling, since it holds a number of books, and ends up taking up far less room and weight than the equivalent paper copies.

I can't see paper vanishing any time soon, and I think the download to PC style of ebook is a pain, but the dedicated reader devices are really good, and have their place in the market. And if nobody likes ebooks, why does a Google search turn up more than ten pages of ebook sites?

By your standards, Harlan Ellison has earned the right to complain loud and long. He does make his work available in electronic form - go look under Harlan's section at fictionwise.com - located at http://www.fictionwise.com/mindwise/authors/30.htm .

Nothing there is over $2. You can buy individual stories, or load up on the whole Ellison bundle for under $10. There are ratings on the individual stories from other readers to help reduce the risk you take when you drop a dollar on a story.

It seems to me that Harlan's pissed mostly because he's only now realising that he should have pro-actively shut the door and put a meter on it before the horse bolted.

Problem is, this is now the most-frequently pirated Ellison story found on alt.binaries.e-books. No wonder he thinks of netizens as primarily thieves.

Alexlit, one of the first e-lit sites, which started out with an ubercool collaborative filtering book recommendation system and added on from there.

Mind's Eye Fiction, which Alexlit subsequently bought.

Fictionwise, another e-lit publisher, which, if I'm not mistaken, actually has a contract to publish some of Harlan Ellison's works.

Peanut Press, which publishes e-books for Palms & PocketPCs--and was bought by NetLibrary.

Now, granted, most of what these sites deal in is reprints, and save for Peanut Press, they focus more toward short stories than entire books. But they seem to be doing rather well, even in the age of the dot-com crash.
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well, crap:

they ARE available in ebook format

My first reaction to this artcle was one of outrage. The position of the Authors Guild is disingenuous at best. But your caracterization of *authors* is just too much.

By your short sighted logic one cold as easily say: Just like the record and movie industry, coders would like software to be pay-per-use. After all, SPA espouses draconian licensing and "copy protection" practices.

Just once try thinking before posting. I know it's not popular here on /., but at least consider it.

In response to your ebooks comment, last I checked (about ten minutes ago, as I love to carry etext on my Palm), most etext is either free or sold in a manner very similar to books. My only concern (gods I hate allowing even half a point to you, but such is life as an intellectually honest person) is that sights like fictionwise.com don't seem to allow for the concept of first sale. Not that it's any easier to do so with etext than it is with software. Each copy would have to have a unique key in order to tell which one you actually purchased. So although there are possible issues there that must be worked out, it's not the black helicopter situation youseem to imply. Besides, ink on dead tree isn't going anywhere. For long format fiction it's still a far better experience that etext, IM(NS)HO.
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If your map and the terrain differ,
trust the terrain.

I think it's dumb that King expects us to pay for different editions. But there is a certain amount of precedent.

Frankly, I think King's set his e-book up to fail, with unrealistic expectations.
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