[extropy-chat] finding old (and new) sf

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:12 PM 7/1/2005 -0700, ML wrote:

> > >No point in paying some publisher for an old
> > >copy of "Blade Runner" (i.e. "DADOES") when [Philip] K.
> > >Dick is too dead to enjoy the royalties.
> >
> > His kids aren't dead.
>
>What do they have to do with anything? Let them get honest jobs.

Good grief! Mike Lorrey the rabid socialist?

The initial comment by Stuart rather confused the central issue, it seems 
to me, by referring to second-hand copies. After all, even if Phil were 
still alive, he still wouldn't be making any royalties from second-hand 
copies.

It's true that any book published in large numbers is likely to be 
available for years to come in second-hand stores, which reduces the 
likelihood that new copies will be published (by reducing the size of the 
market). On the other hand, readers having access to second-hand copies 
also keeps a writer's name alive. However, if free download of scanned 
texts by both dead and living writers were generally available, it would 
certainly obliterate the writers' or their estates' capacity to earn money 
from e-books, and very probably significantly reduce the interest of paper 
publishers to reprint such work. (Experiments in making available some work 
through Creative Commons licences are interesting, but are of course optional.)

My sense of it is this (by analogy): when my father died and left his house 
to his children, Mike appears to be suggesting that we had no right at all 
to use it or sell it and keep the money ourselves. This is rather unexpected.
.................................

But to shift ground slightly: I'm still seriously considering releasing to 
the net a thriller that Barbara Lamar and I wrote based on the idea of 
synthetic chromosomes as a means of defeating ageing and death, increasing 
intelligence, and doing away with bad hair days. We've had astonishing 
resistance to this book from mainstream publishers, generally on the 
grounds that we're endorsing rather than abominating scientific advances of 
this kind.

When someone like Charlie Stross or Cory Doctorow releases a book under CC, 
it is ancillary to paper publication, and their hope is that readers who 
get enthralled by the e-text will get tired of reading on the screen and 
pick up a copy at the bookstore, or via Amazon. CC release is thus a form 
of advertising; the revenue still comes from the paper books. What I'm 
still toying with is the possibility of making this novel available for 
download at no charge, while inviting readers who enjoy it to send us, say, 
a dollar or two via PayPal.

Charlie had 22,000 downloads fairly quickly when he put his new singularity 
novel ACCELERANDO up for grabs. My question: how many people would feel an 
impulse to pay the author a couple of bucks in gratitude for having the 
book might available in this way? Would anyone here be likely to do so?

Damien Broderick