Pete and I are having some very interesting conversations about the future of books, publishing and libraries. There is a lot happening at the moment. There are print-on-demand stations starting to appear (anyone actually seen one at work?). And the development of electronic paper is finally moving from its clunky sci-fi beginnings to something that is starting to actually look like real paper. We’ll assume that the day is not far off when they will have developed a device that will be a pleasure to use and will be no harder to read than a printed page.
Before you freak out – this is not a Death of the Book 
discussion. I don’t think books will die – a book is a thing of beauty and pleasure for too many of us. But I do think that people will prefer to read some of them at least on a reader . Consider this: you’re off travelling and would like to take a stack of trashy novels with you. Instead of losing a quarter of your luggage space you can have all of them in your reader, plus access to anything else you can think of. Your Lonely Planet guides, maps, and for when you feel out of touch – a daily newspaper from home… I love my books but I’d use a reader in a situation like that without hesitation.
So I’m going to make a few assumptions.
1. The readers will be as nice to read as old-fashioned paper.
2. All books will be available online free from somewhere (whether legally or not).
That second assumption comes from looking at parallel situations like the music industry. Regulating music and movies was much easier when there were few options for how we accessed the material. But that’s changed. ipods, phones, laptops… Why should you have to buy the same song or movie over and over just because you have more than one device or travel between countries? Regulation and trying to enforce limitations doesn’t work. I’ve borrowed dvds from the video shop and had them not work on my laptop simply because of overprotective coding. Insane! Either they hadn’t considered my needs or they didn’t care. Things like that make people feel justified in looking for free options. And when that happens with music, and you know that the artists get very little out of every transaction anyway, it feels much more like punishing a company than the creator.
So. Regulation is unlikely to work. And we now seem to be in a situation where people tend to expect that they can find everything free. As soon as there are electronic versions of content, we have to assume it will end up online.
The thing is… I don’t want to hurt the people who make the music, the movies and the books. They’ve shown the creativity and dedication to make this thing I’m enjoying. And if there was a way of downloading the things I want and paying them some money directly – I’d actually do it.
But it’s possible I’m the only one! I’d love to hear what other people think. If you could choose to support the artists you like directly while getting their stuff free – would you do it? Would it seem weird? What would you want out of it? From my perspective – I’d like to get versions of my books (especially out-of-print or unpublished) out there in a few different formats, free, and encourage people to send a few dollars if they wanted to support what I’ve done. Kind of like becoming a patron. I like the idea of having patrons. And being one myself to other creators whose work I like.
