And so to answer your point about cash, I always look at what happens to ‘most’ authors (or musicians etc.) and most books don’t make lots of money. People write books for myriad reasons, few of them are written because the author is sure to make a mint off it. Those are the rock stars, the statistical blip.

So the value in the web is exposure and audience and connection and dissemination and discovery without the random spend of a marketing budget, just the same as it is in music…

I really don’t think advertising is the way forward. There are definitely revenue sharing models that will work, as soon as we start to see/measure the value in audience sharing, and come up with a good way of relating products, ideas, entities (web collectives, if you will), but advertising transfered from mags/news to the web is pretty damned clumsy. Just try reading the thoughts of anyone who’s managed to make a living out of it – what they describe is very rarely anything like a life I’d want to lead…

Also, booksharing is the equivalent to hometaping, not internet piracy, surely? If you can get pdfs onto a Kindle (and that’s how you read), you’re talking about sharing books hundred of thousands of times. If you’re a musician, that’s great, people will come see you live. Trust me, book author tours don’t add the same value.

The one option would be, I guess, to give every book away free on the Internet, but pack it with advertising — newspaper publishing already works that way, often. But an author might get very upset about who s/he’s being asked to (tacitly) endorse.

Truth be told, I know I’ll get a better pieces out of writers if they’re paid (whether immediately or because we’re drawing attention to other product they have). Or I’ll get better writers. Very occasionally you’ll get someone who’s very committed to our product, or wants very much to communicate with our audience — the chances are about as high as the average blog post being read by a thousand readers. So how will I pay them if people aren’t paying to read them? What’ll happen to books is what’s happening to local newspapers — regurgitated opinion shit with no resources for reporters who understand the community.

That’s to say, I can’t answer for music — your arguments seem to add up. But newspapers are already worse then they were (and what’s being lost isn’t being replaced online). I hate the thought that books are next.

With music, that’s not the case – CDs are just clumsy data carriers. The data is all that matters. once the CD is in the machine, the machine is just reading it and playing it via the speakers. Books are about more than that, the interface is different.

Also, because of the ‘one time read’ aspect, books have ALWAYS been a sharing medium. Another great vox-pop that Neil did when he spoke to the Open Rights Group was to ask how many people discovered their favourite author by buying a book of theirs? pretty much no-one put their hand up. Book sharing has always been the discovery method.

Kindles are just a bit bulky and clumsy compared to books and break if you sit on them. Plus they’re fixed width so crap for propping up table legs

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/29292

Some highlights:

“The only way we’re going to change the way things are done is if
artists and fans work together to build new models that give fans what
they want and allow artists to earn a living from their recordings.
And what do you think that the FAC is, Jon?? It’s me and my mates
standing together as artists to tell the label that their business
model is fucked.”

“The reason I’m here is to explore ways that we as artists can win you
back as customers. The great thing about the internet is that it
allows us to talk to each other directly, without relying on edited
media like music papers and radio and such.”

“They [labels] presume to speak for us. When we speak for ourselves
they run for cover – or push other artists like Lily Allen to the fore
so she can take all the flak for them. They worked out well didn’t it?
What happened to her was a good example of the way your community can
bring its voice to bear. Thanks to all the negative comments posted by
P2P users, I doubt the labels will find another artist willing to
publicly champion their stance for a long while.”

“I accept that FAC need to deliver a better message that clearly
states where we stand on file-sharing, but you have to understand that
the vast majority of artists are still wedded to the record industry
view of downloading as a threat. There were over 60 artists in the
room last week when we were discussing how to respond to the
industry’s demand that the govt pass laws to suspend internet
connections, only a dozen from the FAC. Despite evidence that
technical sanctions will not work from several IT experts that we
invited, the majority was clearly in favour of some kind of sanction.
In order to try to stop disconnection, we opted for bandwidth
squeezing as a compromise between all of our positions. Our task now
is to convince our colleagues that there is no technical solution, but
this will take time.”

Follow-up post here: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/29275

The problem I guess is that these routes do allow the Artist to cut out the industry middlemen who still want their slice of our pie, even when it is not theirs to have, and it is through this they maintain their control on this industry.

And this is ultimatley what it is about, control. These people have deluded the public into believing that they know what they want to hear, and the internet and it ability to allow people to communicate directly and exchange ideas is now challenging that.

The fear of freedom for people to make choices about what they want is ultimatley what is driving this, and if people download stuff for free and ultimatley like it then very often they will buy it (not always) because most people are not stupid and do understand that what we do is (certainly for those of us without record label backing) mostly done from our own pockets so that they can continue to listen to music they like when we are not playing Live locally.