What We Might Gain (Article on the upside of ebooks)

[John Dishon]

http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=320&mode=one

[Benjamin Sobieck]

Regardless of your opinion, e-books are the future. Embrace them and figure out a way to make money now, or go the way of the dinosaurs later.

Moving beyond e-books, cell phone novels will be coming up in 2010. By 2012, it's very likely there will be a "Do-It-All" mobile device for phone, text, videos, books, music, movies and word processing.

If you're worried about e-books, wait until people consume novels on cell phones. As John has pointed out, the Japanese are already writing and reading novels on their phones. The "Do-It-All" device will be the vehicle to move these in the future. It's a safe bet, by the way, that what the Japanese do we all will in the future. The Japanese started the text.

[I. J. Parker]

Hmm, isn't there something called "pay per view"? I suppose, they'll keep that for best sellers.

[John McFetridge]

Internet revenue is going to be interesting. It looks like people are happy enough to pay for an internet connection, but not much else once they get online. So, payment for content may have to be between ISP companies and content creators, not directly between consumers and content creators.

Kind of like TV, when we buy a cable package, we may see 'internet packages.'

Of course, here in Canada our largest phone company bought the largest TV network and the largest internet provider (and a national newspaper, but people don't seem to care as much about that), so it's also possible that most internet revenue will flow to the same companies that pay to create the content.

It could certainly happen with TV and movies, and books are a possibility as well.

Plenty of money changes hands on the internet, it's just artists don't get any of it.

[Bob]

Interesting perspective. I'm sorry to say I was one of the founding fathers of the internet. I tested some of the first site to site messages, help Billy Boy get the first DOS system out of the shop so we could sell our PC's (I worked at IBM as a R&D guy). It seemed like such a wondeful thing at the time (1970's) but as it goes with all wondeful things, the mold and putrid festations appear on the edges and eventually destroy the tongue tantalizing taste. E-books look wonderfull now. Beware the future when piracy leaves us daunt and starving for lack of revenues.

[I. J. Parker]

I'm not that optimistic. People will not read more, though they will read more cheaply.