Authors Electric

That the internet has had a profound effect on our world is so obvious that it barely needs stating. In terms of its ability to create long-term social change it's on a par with the printing press, or indeed just about any major technological and scientific development you care to mention. But what effect will all of this have on the arts, and on literature specifically? The internet has, possibly, changed the old buyer-seller dynamic forever, though the impact on certain industries has been greater than on others. Those selling straightforwardly physical objects, such as socks or furniture, have perhaps been less affected (such, at least, is my guess). Others, such as the music or film industries, have been deeply (some would say mortally) wounded by these developments. Piracy and file-sharing are rampant, with many consumers reluctant to pay for an album or film that they can get for free. A pirate, back in the days when pirates had such style. And, where the film and ...

Have I ranted about free books before? I promise I won't again. I know that offering your books free works for a lot of people, so who am I to argue? What do you mean I always argue - with anybody, about anything? But the free I want to talk about now is the unintentionally free. The rip-off free. The pirating free. The illegal free. If I buy a paperback book, I own that book as a physical entity - the paper it's printed on and the physical copy of the story on its pages. I don't own the content of the book. The story itself remains the property of the author and I've just bought the right to read it as often as I like. And lend it to other people too. But ebooks don't have a physical presence. An ebook is a digital file stored on a server somewhere. When I buy an ebook, I buy the right to download it to a reading device and read it as often as I like. The fact that Amazon apparently has the right to remove it from my device without warning or compensation i...