Gutenberg Revisited

Wow! The temperature today is 25 degrees cooler than yesterday. I think the high temperature of the day was reached early this morning when I took Tab to the train station. Then a cold front moved through a little later in the morning, and the weather became wonderfully cool. I turned off the air conditioner for the first time in days and opened up all the windows to air out the house. The cool breeze drifting through the open windows felt like a benediction.

For the past week I have been following an ongoing discussion in the alt.binaries.e-book newsgroup with great interest. I've been lurking in this group for awhile, downloading books for reading on my Palm. Then someone made the mistake of posting Roger Zelazny books on alt.books.roger-zelazny, thus alerting fans of this author to the existence of unauthorized digital copies. Persons purporting to be science fiction authors or friends of authors invaded the binaries newsgroup, hurling accusations of theft. This sparked a flamewar between the two newsgroups that lasted for weeks. As is usual in flamewars, there was a lot of namecalling and very little tolerance for opposing viewpoints.

Over the past week, something interesting has been happening, however. One science fiction author, Kevin O'Donnell, realized that ebook readers are not trying to put authors out of business by bootlegging etexts of their work. He started a dialog with ebook readers, in which many readers claimed they would gladly pay for ebooks if the ebooks were reasonably priced and if there were an easy way to do so. As an experiment, O'Donnell released one of his out-of-print short stories, "Useful Life," using the shareware model. The following notice appears at the end of the story text:

This electronic edition has been made available for shareware distribution by Kevin O'Donnell, Jr., the copyright holder. It may be reproduced electronically, and converted into other electronic formats, provided it appears unchanged in its entirety, including all this edition information, and it is never offered for sale, nor placed on a site or volume where there is a fee for access. Permission to reprint in any other fashion is specifically prohibited. All other rights reserved.

If you enjoyed reading it, please use PayPal (www.paypal.com) to send US$0.20 (twenty US cents) to kodjr@sff.net. If PayPal is not available in your nation, please give the equivalent amount to the charity of your choice.

This development has made me feel like a fly on the wall in Johannes Gutenberg's workshop. Whether we like it or not, the publishing world is changing. Authors and publishers who are willing to accept these changes and work with them, instead of reflexively resisting them, could be opening up a whole new market.

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