Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

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I was just thinking about this today, I hope you don't mind me bouncing it off of you?

The computers & robots seem poised to make most human labor obsolete. (I'm only really good at programming computers and I feel like my career prospects just evaporated. Craigslist job section seems to agree with that assessment as well.)

To me it seems like the obvious response is to sort of declare ourselves the winners (Humanity: 1, Nature: 0) and get on with Star Trek. (In other words, institute something like UBI so people don't starve and/or riot, fix up our relationship with the ecology so civilization doesn't crash, ...and then I don't care what we do.)

What I'm getting at, is, as a professional author, if you were paid just to live and write, would you still want to be paid-per-copy of your work? I don't mean in a greed sense ("If it is money it is good.") but more in the philosophical or practical senses.

As an example of what I mean, the young fellow who writes/draws "Kill Six Billion Demons" ( https://killsixbilliondemons.com/ ) basically went from art school directly to a fan-supported, uh, career on one story, releasing pages as he drew them. (He then also publishes hardcopies, and I think he sells schwag too.)

This exactly. I'm actually really surprised that so many people here who are head-deep in the open-source software community think that books are somehow different.

Is restricting the use of your software or the blog post you spent a long time researcher or whatever to paying customers really want you want?

When I write software I want the most people I can reach to use it. I get a kick out of people finding my software useful.

The world we live in now with a huge universe of free software is a bazzilion times better than the world of the 1980s when I started programming. I want the same for other industries. Pay people to live and let them do what they enjoy. Some of them will create stuff for others.

> What I'm getting at, is, as a professional author, if you were paid just to live and write, would you still want to be paid-per-copy of your work?

Ideally I'd like to know how many people were reading my work, and whether they liked it -- but I really just want the freedom to write (in reasonable comfort).

Unfortunately actually-existing-capitalism as it is today provides no mechanism for doing this, at least on any scale that can support more than a tiny handful of authors, plus the folks climbing the teaching-MFA LitFic academic career ladder (for whom writing is often simply an extramural career progression activity -- with notable exceptions).

That's the failed promise of Amazon Unlimited though, isn't it? Authors get some sliver of the monthly $10 in exchange for having their books on the service, according to how much they're read. If it cost readers $1,000/month and had enough customers then author's could collect real amounts of money and live off that. Unfortunately, the number of people who can even afford an extra $1,000/mo is small, never mind be willing to pay that.

The other problem is a bit harder to solve though. Authors don't get paid by how much they're read, but by how many books people buy. There's a subtle difference between the two, and as the story about a large number of record owners not owning record players suggests, I might read book one of a series, get really excited about the rest of the series and buy them all. And then not read them. Maybe it balances out with readers passing one copy of a book around, but I doubt that. That might just have to be something author would have to face if Expensive Kindle Unlimited ever became a thing.

> Ideally I'd like to know how many people were reading my work, and whether they liked it -- but I really just want the freedom to write (in reasonable comfort).

FWIW, I kinda figured. If you were really that into money you would have picked a different career, eh? (As a fan I'm glad you didn't.)

> Unfortunately actually-existing-capitalism as it is today provides no mechanism for doing this,

Ah, that's where it all falls down, eh?

I've got some ideas, and I just got some land on which to try them. At risk of sounding like an asshole, I'm looking forward to finding out if I'm a genius or just full of shit, you know?

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