Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "The Eternal Squire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Without copyright, how could one possibly earn a living writing a > > novel? > > This guy seems to be doing ok: http://craphound.com > His publishers are the only ones allowed to sell his novels commercially, > but you can download them all and print them out noncommercially for > your own personal enjoyment or to share with your friends. No obfuscation > is needed. One might also quip (not truthfully in Cory's specific case, I hasten to add!-) that many of today's novels are intrinsically obfuscated enough to need no further technological help on that front;-). Quips aside, the question is a sensible one to ask -- not as a rhetorical question, as TES apparently intended, of course, and not just about novels (many different creative endeavours may require different answers). The "novel" as a specific literary form is not that old, just a few centuries, but the issues were not very different for many other literary forms over the ages and cultures, and many different answers have been given or attempted. For example, Virgil was writing poems (epic and otherwise), not novels, but that's not very relevant to the question of how he made a living; the classic solution, in his case, was to find rich patrons willing to pay him to do so. Of course, there are obvious problems with this model... for example, Virgil was paid to write the Aeneid because his patrons liked its patriotism (as well as its towering artistic qualities), but a work with equally good art but an anti-patriotic ideology would have been much harder to monetize at that time (and also risked landing the author in the soup, as Ovid found out, but that's another issue, quite unrelated to monetization). Zooming forwards a couple of millennia, we see the model of "serialization" -- having the novel published in periodic installments by a magazine. Avid readers, we're told, crowded the piers of New York waiting for ship to land which carried the magazine with the latest installment of some Dickens novel -- and Dumas and Sue, in France, had fully comparable success in similar ways. At that time, copyright existed, in theory, but practically wasn't very well enforced (most particularly, I believe, in the USA, where the probability of a British publisher of actually enforcing a copyright was laughably low...) -- nevertheless, the reasonable cheapness of magazines coupled with the readers' urgency for the next installment let these authors earn a comfortable living anyway. Here, the problem is presumably that you need VERY popular novels for this to work -- but then, a tiny fraction of novelists actually make a comfortable living from just their novels, even with today's monetization approaches. Modern equivalent of serialization (publishing one chapter at a time on the web, the next chapter to come only if the author receives enough payment for the previous one) have been attempted, but without much success so far; however, the holy grail of "micropayments" might yet afford a rebirth for such a model -- if paying for a chapter was extremely convenient and cheap, enough people might choose to do so rather than risk the next chapter never appearing. Remember that, by totally disintermediating publishers and bookstores, a novelist may require maybe 1/10th of what the book would need to gross in stores, in order to end up with the same amount of cash in his or her pockets. One could go on for a long time, but the key point is that there may or may not exist viable monetization models for all sorts of endeavours, including the writing of novels, depending on a lot of other issues of social as well as legal structures. Let's not be blinded by one model that has worked sort of decently for a small time in certain sets of conditions, into believing that model is the only workable one today or tomorrow, with conditions that may be in fact very different. Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
