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Guest Editorial

Louann Miller

Those of you with what is technically known as Lives may not have been following the free-ranging conversation on e-books, copyright, and the future of authors getting paid that has been going on for a couple of weeks in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written.

It started out with an anonymous poster uploading the entire text of a recent Dune novel to the newsgroup in a series of huge, badly edited OCR transcripts as his (?) way of opining that copyright is dead, e-books will destroy the concept of authors and publishers being paid for their labors, everyone should pirate books at will, etc. Not a lot of detailed knowledge of r.a.sf.w. is required to deduce that this started a fight. Professionally published participants in the ensuing exchange of views included Ann (A.C.) Crispin, Joel Rosenberg, S.M. Stirling, John Ringo, and Eric Flint plus a number of unpublished but respected newsgroup regulars.

Various opinions floated, at various times, included:

• E-books are a natural medium for piracy, which is a bad and unstoppable thing. It will lead to the end of quality, edited fiction because all the authors will have to go back to their day jobs, and the reading world will be one vast fanfic-like slushpile forever.

• E-books are a natural medium for piracy, which is a bad thing, and will require draconian legal/cryptographic measures to prevent scenario A. Book pirates should have bad things happen to them in prison showers.

• E-books are a natural medium for piracy, which is a good thing and will lead to a vastly wider range of fiction. Writers will write for the love of their craft, editing and/or recommendations will likewise be handled on a volunteer basis, and everything will be wonderful.

• E-books are not a natural medium for piracy, because most people will prefer to pay a reasonable fee (set by market forces and competition) to get a good-quality e-book rather than a crappy pirate edition. E-books will co-exist as a book acquisition system alongside paperbacks, hardbacks, libraries, and used bookstores, none of which have thrown each other out of business.

• Whether e-books are a natural medium for piracy or not, any outcome including a drastic decrease in authorial incomes is to be preferred to the kind of Big Brother access to people's ISP accounts and hard drives that stamping out piracy would require. (Refs to Steve Jackson case, confiscation of property of accused drug dealers, etc.)

• In 50 years, paying authors will be irrelevant because novels will be written by computer simulations which will not WANT to be paid. (A distinctly minority opinion)

• Copyright is profoundly immoral and should be repealed as a legal concept; information wants to be free.

• Copyright is responsible for the vast increase in quantity and quality of books in our culture versus previous ones without copyright; pirating books is just plain theft. My novel no more wants to be free than your credit card numbers 'want' to be free.

• E-books, even pirated ones, will act as advertising for print editions of the same books and for the author's work generally. Cheap e-books are much less likely to be pirated than expensive ones, because most people feel ripped off by an exorbitant fee structure. People want their authors to make a living because they want to read the next book too.

The last of which was stated by (among others) Eric Flint, a Baen author whose work I have not read. Whatever his literary merits, he has a sense of the grand gesture and the moral stature to put his money where his mouth is. At his request, in the last couple of days, his first novel "Mother of Demons" currently out in paperback was posted to the Baen Webscriptions list as a free download. (This had previously been done with two David Weber novels.)

The idea has grown since then. The idea now is that Baen authors will have the option of making backlisted books (def. as one year since paperback release or two years since hardcover, when most of the royalty money has already come in anyway) available for free download. Flint, and Baen, are betting that this will have the effect of hooking new readers on authors or series that they might not otherwise have tried -- the netted equivalent of borrowing a book from a friend.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens next. I have the oddest feeling I just saw a small slice of history.

Louann Miller

Eric Flint's account of the debate (and its result, now called the Baen Free Library) is now up on the Baen web site here.