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There was a 1982 hugo award short story that had this scenario in it, in the end Senator Bob Dole (well over 120) decided he wanted copyrights to finish after a few decades.

The story to which you refer is by Spider Robinson and actually won the 1983 Hugo; the title is Melancholy Elephants and it is available for free web perusal on tale.com (well, free as in reading the second half of the story requires you to load pages with ads, but they're banner ads not popups and realtively unobtrusive.)

Melancholy Elephants was also the eponymic of a book of short stories which contains other excellent material, including some "Callahan's Bar" shorts. Check around your local used book store. I highly recommend it.

Robinson is an interesting author. He's not long on "technical" science fiction, but IMHO he excels at exploring human interactions with extrapolations of scientific progress. (By which I mean that he doesn't spend much time trying to come up with a plausible physics for, say, FTL travel -- but his exploration of how working FTL might affect people's lives would be fascinating.)

Ole

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

There are 2 things that will help him - the quality of the work ie will people enjoy it, and his copyright over the work. If the work is good, and people enjoy it, there may be a return. However, if the copyright is reduced and after a few years he has no rights on it at all ( ie anyone can copy it ) then the chances of making a return are reduced.

If he hasn't made a return by ten years, the chance of making a return after that period is further reduced by market demand for the latest and greatest.

Now, how does that help with increasing the number of authors / books? Simple, it doesn't! In fact it is the exact opposite!

Not always. We need to maximize the total utility function (i.e. utility of work in copyright + utility of work in public domain), somewhere between "no copyprivilege" and "perpetual copyprivilege." I don't see how a 95-year copyright term is closer to this maximum than the 28-year term of the Copyright Act of 1790. In fact, long-term copyprivileges make it harder to create a musical work without accidentally stepping on somebody else's privileges (see also the short story "Melancholy Elephants" and the Yes! We have no bananas! case).

You propose to limit the financial reward to authors.

Patent law already limits the financial reward to inventors. I propose consistency in the limits.

The simple economics of the western world ... means that perhaps, some authors will not be able to write full time, and it will be far more difficult for new authors to be published at all, whether self published or not. So, you argue that reducing copyright will increase the number of authors / books, when you argument supports the opposite.

Justify this. What percent of books published nowadays do not make 90% of their total gross revenue within ten years after first publication? What percent of Hollywood motion pictures (not counting remakes that add significant original content) make any significant amount of money after even two years on the market?

Why don't you just admit it. You do not want to pay for it that's it, something for nothing. Simple!

Or I can't afford to pay for it. Or the author's estate refuses to license it at any price. Or I accidentally independently created it, and I can't afford an attorney to convince a judge of this.

I hope they try to patent it, as there's a very easy case of prior art to be found on Mind's Eye Fiction. Been around for years.

Its use on Mind's Eye is sensible and inoffensive, with a view toward providing options rather than depriving them. If someone wants to read the story for free, he has to view the banner ads. If he wants to buy it cheaply, he can do so without them.

AFAICT, there are only two features that e-books have over regular books:

1) You can use the same physical device for multiple content. Unless you are on the space shuttle, who cares?

2) You can download books from the Internet. Great, except has anybody here tried to use Napster/Gnutella recently? From the moment you first start looking to the moment you are able to use the (correct) file how much time elapses?

Gutenberg or Gnutella'd titles take a little longer, as I have to unwrap the text before running it through a converter--but even then, emacs makes it easy enough that it just takes a couple of minutes and a few Meta-X commands before I'm done. And if it's a Gutenberg book or otherwise freely available, I can even donate it to the Memoware free e-book library when I finish. (Search under "Meadows" there for all the titles I've donated so far.)

For me, reading books on my Visor is fast, convenient, and a sure-fire boredom fighter. But to each his own.

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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1. tell stories that change the mood of the series totally, alienating fans
2. or
3. tell non-episodic stories that fit in with the Trek universe.

There are definite disadvantages to the second approach. (the disadvantages of the first are all but self-evident) You can't keep extending a given series, for example, because real stories have endings. Once you've told a story, you have to find a new story to tell, and if you don't find new characters to go with it, the story becomes somewhat derivative. The other disadvantage of the second approach is that a full story requires a certain amount of resources to be committed to the project beforehand. I mean, you can kill the series halfway through the story, but then there are so many loose ends that the complaints kill your public relations people. And finally, how do you do movie tie-ins with a finite series? Short answer: you can't, not in the traditional manner. You can retell the story in a short movie, you can make the climax of the series and story into a movie, but you can't create the traditional 'related to the TV series' endless parade of movies.

All these things may put off executives from creating a 'one big plot' Trek series. But they're milking the series dry, as things currently stand. Ah well, the cool geeks are off watching stuff from Japan and Hong Kong these days. We've seen Trek, and unless some bold moves are made, they won't show us anything new...

If you read Melancholy Elephants, you'll see how Copyright extensions will eventually kill creativity in this country, but that's nothing new. I mean, we killed comic books as a mass medium in this country, through societal pressures and strange intellectual property laws... Witness Japan, in contrast, with a Manga series for everyone. But I'm not bitter, noooo... I'm both determined to learn another language, and incredibly bitter...Ok, I'll stop ranting now...(Damn Stan Lee to hell)...really, I'll stop now, rea

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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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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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As it is, there is a technology out there to detect adblockers and prevent the next page from being served if they're in operation; it was originated by and is used by the folks at Mind's Eye Fiction for the "pay for the story by viewing banner ads" payment option. If sites were really concerned about losing a few pennies from banner ads not loading, they would institute it themselves.
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The e-literature website Mind's Eye has an interesting model. You have multiple ways to pay for a story, including buying it by credit card (their prices are quite reasonable; most short stories are 35-70 cents each) or reading it interspersed with banner ads. Their story-serving system is smart, too; no ad-view, no further content-loading. I hope that sites don't start using this tech in general; Mind's Eye's use of it is legitimate and one with which I cannot argue (they have to be paid for their content somehow; if you don't like banner ads, you can charge it), but if sites started thinking they were "entitled" to banner ad revenue, that could be a problem.
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Of course, that would also break compatibility with Lynx, but hey, who uses that old thing anymore anyway (sarcasm sarcasm)?
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Some content on the internet is free, but some content you must pay for. Viewing advertisements it paying with your time. If you can block out advertisements, you are no longer paying. You are essentially stealing.

Personally, I regard these advertisements as stealing my meager 33.6KBPS bandwidth from me, and in some cases holding the rest of the webpage hostage until they load themselves. The animated ones are especially bad in this regard, as they're essentially not just one image, but several. And this is saying nothing of the privacy issues that allow people like DoubleClick to track where you go from page to page with them even without using cookies. No thanks; include me out.

Furthermore, almost no money is ever made from banner ads anyway; most people ignore them and almost nobody ever clicks on them. Incidentally, the technology to block ad-blockers does exist. Mind's Eye Fiction uses it in their "read our stories for free by viewing banner ads" payment option. If places really wanted to force their viewers to see the banners, they could use it.

I regard banner ads as being similar to spam email, and feel justified in using whatever means I can to block them.

I also use the "mute" button on my TV set during commercials...does that make me a bad man, too?
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Even leaving aside Project Gutenberg, there are still many ebookeries that don't go in for this sort of encryption. For instance, Alexandria Digital Literature and Mind's Eye Press have been selling shorter works by reknowned SF authors (Vonda McIntire, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, etc.) in open formats (ASCII, HTML, Palm/AportisDoc, etc.) for quite some time, have never had problems with piracy, and seem to be doing well enough to stay afloat. (And Alexlit even has a nifty collaborative filtering book recommender that is worth visiting the site for all by itself.)

And yet these sites are never mentioned in any of these articles. It's just the flashy newcomers like King and the big spenders like Fatbooks who get the publicity, while these high-quality smaller providers languish in obscurity. Feh.

If anybody can publish anything, then nobody will want to read it. Which is why the future lies with ebook concerns like Alexlit, Mind's Eye, and others. Forget FatBrain...I don't have the time or money to spend on someone else's vanity e-press.

(As a side note, Alexlit also offers a very nice collaborative-searching literature recommender engine, which I believe is the first of its kind on the 'net. Which is sort of an instant peer suggestion device.)

My two favorite e-book sites, Alexlit and Mind's Eye, both offer e-books for download in a variety of formats--text, HTML, Rocketbook, Palm(Aportis)Doc, and so forth. My third-favorite, Peanut Press, is closed-format, Palm-only, but my Visor is easy enough to read it from. I've read whole novels that way--including A Fire Upon the Deep, which is one of the longest novels you can find these days.

Incidentally,
Quite a good cautionary tale.

This is actually kind of old news; a SalonMag report from months ago on e-books and the Palm Pilot mentions this site--which is how I found it in the first place.

The Good: The e-books are the full text of the books in question--including an 821K The Fire Upon the Deep--at $7, one of the better buys out there. The reader is free, has good features, even including genuine italics, and there's a Java-powered converter you can get to make Peanut-readable books of your own.

They've got some good books there, too. AFUTD, works by Dickson, Silverberg, and so on. I've already bought several books through them.

They're giving away some books for free, too--including the first book in the Remo Williams Destroyer series, and a short story by some guy I've never heard of.

As soon as you buy the books, you download them. Zap, they're on your hard drive--along with the reader, in case you lost it. No shipping delays...boom, instant sync to your Palm.

The Bad: The price on these books is exactly the same as standard retail price--which isn't so bad for if the book is in paperback, as are A Fire Upon the Deep, Dickson's Necromancer and The Tactics of Mistake, and so on. $2-7 for an e-book...well, it's a little more than you'd pay through Amazon (unless you take shipping into consideration), but that's offset by the convenience of being able to slip a full-sized, thick paperback book into your pocket.

But there are also hardcover editions for sale there...for $15, $20, and so forth. And this makes no sense at all, to me. When you pay $20 for a book, you're paying for the difference between that book and paperback. Better binding, bigger pages, and so forth. But there's no such difference between a "hardcover" e-book and a "paperback" e-book. E-books are e-books.

(I can guess, of course, that the reason they do this is that the publishers don't want the e-books to steal business from the physical hardcover books, hence they price them the same. But there just aren't that many e-book readers yet--so it wouldn't really affect their sales much one way or another, and it could lead to the wrong conclusion...the publishers seeing that the e-books aren't selling very well, and deciding that people don't want them.)

There's no Peanut Reader for any platform except the Palm...which means you either get a Palm or run a Palm emulator on your desktop--and you can't run a Palm emulator until you have a Palm ROM, which you get either by buying a Palm and using a ROM reader, or signing up for the development program and going through a bunch of rigamarole to get it.

And mostly, it seems, the only books available are out of print ones--ones that print publishers have, pretty much, already abandoned. Which means there's some good books there, but not a very good selection just yet. Which is a shame.

Other e-book sites:

There are some other sites selling "real e-books" too.

Mind's Eye Publishing has some works by well-known authors, including Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, and Spider Robinson, at reasonable prices.

Alexandria Digital Literature has some e-stories by known names for sale, too, and also features a nifty-neato collaborative filtering literature recommender that really deserves more attention than it's gotten.

Online Originals sells e-books that haven't ever been published anywhere else, for $7 US each. They also have a rather interesting deal where you can buy a share in the royalties of a particular e-book for $500. It's nice that they're optimistic, at any rate.

And we shouldn't forget the Palmtop Library, which has a whole bunch of free, public-domain e-books for immediate download.

E-book reading on the Palm is nice. It'll be nicer still when there's a better selection. I want Snow Crash on my Palm, dammit! And it would be deliciously ironic to be able to read Ben Bova's Cyberbooks, a delightful satire on the publishing industry and the repercussions that occur when someone invents an e-book, as an e-book, don't you think?