Monthly Archives: April 2006

In the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, the Utopian fantasy of having a virtual printing press in every home took hold. While the surface of the idea shone with an appealingly egalitarian luster, what we had long known–that most people do not write well–again became painfully apparent. The Web was not going to usher in a golden age of plebeian poetry.

By 2000 it was clear that the Web largely had become a conduit for commerce. Some idealism remained, and Stephen King engaged in his famous experiment, publishing The Plant in serial fashion. The installments were made available in an unencrypted format, and payment was on the honor system. King and his publisher considered the experiment a failure, and that single announcement silenced many who had been clamoring for a new paradigm in publishing. The money men woke up, took the reins, and put the wheels of the cart back in their well-worn tracks, perhaps whipping the horse a little more than was strictly necessary in the process.

Although most of the publishing industry was going through recidivism, science fiction mavericks pushed ahead, Baen Books leading the charge. The Baen rallying cry, one Cory Doctorow often repeats as a reason for making his books freely available, was:

Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc. [1]

Baen authors and Doctorow claim that sales have been adequate, and while I certainly find their approach to publishing intriguing, I am not convinced that it will work for literary fiction in the same way that it seems to work for science fiction. Science fiction has the “cool” factor that creates wide interest, and its readership is already accustomed to doing most of its reading from a screen.

In the early days of the Web, I created a site for some of my writing and had the horrible experience of seeing my work propagate, often uncredited or simply with someone else’s name pasted where mine went, to other sites for the gain of others. This led to my pulling back from the Web and not posting any of my writing for many years. I still get the occasional e-mail from a harried English professor whose student has ripped off a poem of mine that was on the Web for a period of eight months almost ten years ago.

Reference

1. Flint, Eric. “Introducing the Baen Free Library.” 11 Oct. 2000 http://www.baen.com/library/>.

Resources

• Read about The Plant at Wikipedia
• Read about Creative Commons Licenses at Creative Commons
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at Alex Bosworth’s Weblog
• Read Criticism of Creative Commons at PC Magazine