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

[Brett Paatsch]

Damien Broderick wrote:

> This discussion has skidded weirdly away from my original suggestion, 
> which was precisely to make available to potential users an experience 
> (reading the text) that they could evaluate *after use*and then pay for, 
> if they felt that its value was sufficient.
>
> This is not altogether unprecedented. If you go to a restaurant (rather 
> than a McEatery) and order a meal, they bring it to you, you eat and drink 
> it, and only after that do you pay them. If the food and drink was 
> repulsive, you might decide not to pay, although this would be regarded as 
> bad form.
>
> The difference with downloadable material is that competition in the form 
> of unedited and free (or edited and textjacked) downloads is abundant. 
> When your daily reading experience is largely comprised of blogs, 
> advertisement-subsidised newspaper or journal downloads, etc, you start to 
> feel resentful if somebody has the gall to ask you to pay for your 
> entertainment.

Psychologically, though its a while since I did social psych, I think you 
are
right on here.

> In particular, you're likely to resist the urge to pay for something you 
> have already used. To me, this is a sign of moral enfeeblement in our 
> community, but hey -- if that's the way people are, there is no point 
> trying to make a living by flying in the face of it.

The technique, which both your restaurant example (bad form etc) and
psych theory suggests, is that you get some commitment to pay if they
like it before hand, ie have the prospective reader do something, take
some action, put some details into a database or something, and they
will far more likely treat the exercise as a transaction and honour their
side of it.

Of course some will not want to pre-register with you before
downloading, but those that do are much more the type that are likely
to pay you.

Perhaps if there were a bunch of authors like yourself and Charlie
you could find someone to put together a registration service of
readers for you. They 'promise' to pay if they like, they say what
book and what author, having selected from the online blurb.

I haven't screened this idea for commercial viability against the
existing offerings in the market but I've a sense its worth checking
out.    Its just not interesting enough for me personally to do.
Perhaps Adrian or Emlyn or the Futuretag folk (might put together
a shopfront for transhumanist authors or some such) or some of
your other web savy buds on this list could work out a way of
knocking up a model or prototype.

The market is clearly open to innovative solutions right now.
Perhaps.

> In any event, the point of my proposal was that the reader gets
> to assess the value of what has just been consumed, and pay
> what the reader regards as a fair price for it. Weird, huh?

Not weird, no.

Brett Paatsch