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I had the feeling the author was talking about out-of-print books. It was talked about a bit, but that wasn't the main emphasis.

I guess a hybrid model would be good. If you can get your book to a publisher, they'll pay you that initial signing price, and royalties. Often you get the benefits of their promotion networks. Sometimes you have to agree to book tours or talks depending on the type of book/publisher.

Then after your book has been pulled from print, or it's only printed on-demand from Amazon sales, see if you can give it an open access release. That way an author can get that initial bump of money, plus the possibility of long tail readership.

If you're an author lucky enough to get really popular (with a fiction novel) and your book takes off, obviously the 2nd part won't come about and maybe you should just try to see that it happens in your will after you've past. However few published authors are RR Martins or Kim Robinsons. ... Although, now I wonder what type of world we'd be in if great authors, instead of passing on book rights to their families/estates, arranged for their books to be Creative Commons after they die.

I think technical books are a bit different than a lot of other books. They generally have a smaller audience and are most valid for a year or two. These and text books (for core subjects) have always been around $50-$100. More niche books or reference books are many times more.

Since the audience is small and most of the benefit is early on, I think there's a lot of value in publicly releasing it later. Much like id Software tends to open source their engines about 5 years after release even though they would license and sell it for many thousands of dollars.

About your javascript example. A lot of companies are just very tight with money. I doubt most places I worked would use version control if it wasn't free. Years would go by when we needed to update something like MySQL on a server, but nobody had the time. I'd ask, "Can't we just get a contractor to carry it out? We're all busy and it doesn't make sense to hire someone full time." but that fell on deaf ears. I imagine part of it as mindlessly sticking to a system that has worked for them (only having full time workers and doing everything in house) and part of it is getting burned by wasting money on unused services. I've often seen, "We're paying 10k a year for that? I can install/port an open source version and spend probably 10 hours a year maintaining it"

Personally, I've pushed to open source anything that's not a competitive advantage. I see everyone wasting too much time doing the same thing at multiple companies that just take time away from what we like/want doing and what makes us money.

> Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work?

No. The question is what's the right way to get there?

> I'll go a step further and say that I think that authors offering up their work for free hurts the entire ecosystem, since it gives consumers the expectation that information is free.

Once produced, information should be free. Doing research, writing it down, making a book, none of that needs to be free.

Can you explain more up here, is research/making/writing is not free, how should one get paid for it(research/../..) ?

> Doing research, writing it down, making a book, none of that needs to be free.

That works in some cases. I get paid for ghost writing articles and books for business people. They usually publish for free to make themselves look clever. But no one would claim that the result is independent or motivated by artistic creativity.

Your model is fine for hackwork and what is essentially marketing, but that's about all it's fine for. No one would have paid $INSERT_FAVORITE_NOVELIST to research and write their novels if they knew there'd be zero chance of making a return on that investment.

If a genie came up to you, demonstrated its powers to your satisfaction, and then gave you the choice:

a. Give him 20 dollars, or b. He retroactively erases your favourite book from history

You'd probably pay him.

It's basically patronship. You pay someone to make art for the sake of the art (or social standing, or whatever). It's not perfect (you can't predict reliably whether the artist will make anything good, and there are questions of incentives damaging the art) but it's better than nothing, and these days, with the internet, patronship can be crowd-funded.

It has been successful: I've read several webnovels written as serials whose authors are being supported on patreon by fans, essentially being paid for the act of making directly rather than by selling. It's probably usually a paltry amount, but it's something: it shows some subset of people want to give money to authors when they don't have to (the serials are released for free).

As you say, it's usually a paltry amount. I doubt that many make a a decent living off of this let alone enough to pay support staff such as editors and the like. The biggest issue is the free rider one... why should I pay you when others will pay and I'll get the same benefit. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do (I personally voluntarily contribute to several podcast creators who I like) but it's reality.

But it's clearly not a "paltry amount" if it's enough to fund the work and ensure that it gets made. Isn't that ultimately what matters?

I saw an article that about 2% of Patreon patronees make above federal minimum wage which is still way below a living wage. There are a tiny handful who make a lot, but for the most part this isn't a model that is working for people who want this to be their main source of income.

> No one would have paid $INSERT_FAVORITE_NOVELIST to research and write their novels if they knew there'd be zero chance of making a return on that investment.

Uh, do you buy novels for RoI? I thought you'd buy them to read and enjoy them. And you'd give novelists money so that they can write a book for you to read and enjoy.

He's not talking about ROI for the consumer, he's talking about ROI for the author who put time into writing a novel. Take Dickens, who was famously opposed to the lack of copyright laws in America at the time and felt that he was getting cheated by people who read his work without paying him. I wonder how many people sent him money out of good will?

Yes, there is Patreon for supporting creators, but very few people make a decent living this way. And many authors would prefer a publisher who helps them take a risk by fronting money to something like Patreon, where you are at the mercy of your consumers who may or may not give you enough money to create your work.

> It's hard to get my boss to agree to pay $300 for a non-open source, but really nifty JS library

That's pretty bad. Every company I've ever worked at allowed anything under $500 to be charged to the company card without prior approval.

>We've gotten to a point that many (maybe most) people won't pay $5 for a high quality game that they get hours of usage out of.

I would love if I could pay $5 for a high quality game I got hours of use out of.

Currently my only option is to pay $5 for a spin on a shitty slot machine that 95% of the time gives me template trash or a college assignment.

As a result I'm happy to pay $15 for a game on Steam, but I'll agonize forever over a $2 phone game.

Most books aren't really profitable. Even for the publishers the only really profitable books are few and far between, especially for non-fiction. The main benefit most authors gain seems to be to stake their claim as "expert" and charge higher rates/start consulting on this basis.

Not completely unrelated: "Reflections of a Textbook Author" by Greg Mankiw

This is a PDF

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/reflections_o...

Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.

> Information should be free. Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it.

There's no question that humanity benefits from free access to information. But humanity also benefits from high quality information, and the way you get there is by rewarding people for producing it. Most great modern literature is the result of publishers who paid authors for their work. Free information is great, but in my opinion, it's not worth losing the literature from Dickens, Tolstoy or Fitzgerald, or countless other great authors whose work is available at a reasonable price and at least some of whom (I'd venture to guess most of whom) might not have written these works without monetary incentive. And that monetary incentive only exists because we grant people exclusive rights to their intellectual property.

That monetary incentive is automatically induced in a capitalist society. When people have to pull their own weight, buy their own food + necessities etc, no one can reasonably be expected to spend hours producing high quality information for free.

I firmly disagree with pretty much everything you have said.

There is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works, and indeed there is plenty of evidence that inhibits it. See http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm for a comprehensive look at the subject. While I dont agree with their conclusions, the data they show is solid.

Let's take Game of Thrones, a show that I'm sure many people reading this thread watch. The final season cost $90m to make. Would this investment have been made if not for intellectual property rights that give HBO exclusive license to distribute the content? If Amazon, Google and Netflix could just take the work and distribute it for free, then would HBO have been willing to fund this?

The same goes for many things that are costly to produce, such as movies or investigative journalism. Yes, there are people who are willing to work for free, but it's nonsense to argue that "there is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works". Once upon a time, you had wealthy patrons who were the principle supporters of the arts. The system worked to some extent, but even Jeff Bezos can't afford to foot the bill for every movie made today.

EDIT: yes, game of thrones is heavily pirated, but as the article linked to below points out, the only reason this benefits HBO is that it leads to more subscriptions. In a world without copyright, Netflix could take GOT episodes the second they are created and put them up on its own platform, completely legally. I wonder how many people would pay HBO in that scenario. Right now, the benefit to subscribing to HBO is that you get to watch Game of Thrones legally, with a better viewing experience and you save the hassle of going through seedy torrent sites trying to find a high quality copy. The people who feel a moral obligation to pay for what they consume probably were already subscribers anyway.

Erm...I don't think Game of Thrones is what the OP is talking about. You're talking about entertainment, and GP is talking about "information" in the context that "Humanity as a whole benefits from free access to it". Is humanity benefiting from watching actors enact stage combat scenes with makeup and costumes?

I tend to agree with you on this specific example, but there's also plenty of work that IS good quality in my opinion that wouldn't get funded if the entity funding it didn't get exclusive access to distribute. I would say that the New York Times (or pick your favorite paper) is a good example of this. There's a good amount of quality writing that people don't get paid for out there, but funding things like investigative pieces that take months or years to research just doesn't happen much outside of well-funded newspapers that traditionally get that funding because they are the owners of the copyright, so if you want the info, you need to pay them.

Game of Thrones is a pretty bad example to use. Year after year it is one of the most pirated shows out there, which HBO tacitly approves of. Far more people watch the show for free than actually pay for it, but HBO still indirectly benefits from this massive popularity.

https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...

You are entering into a much more complicated territory there. The reason things like $90m TV shows and $200m movies get made is due to history. Solving distribution, getting things from point A to point B, was the hardest and most valuable problem to solve, bar none, for a century. It built empires. It made the publishing system that we're familiar with (and growing out of) possible.

You see, there is a problem with publishing media that relies upon popular reception. Popular reception is perfectly random. There aren't any trends to identify, and no element of the works themselves can be tailored to increase your chances of success with it. It's been extensively studied. The only way publishers are able to fund projects ahead of time that cost so much and still turn a profit on what is essentially a coin flip is because they control distribution. When a terrible flop hits the theaters, they can pull it immediately and replace it with another attempt. When a film finds success, they can keep it in theaters for ages, minimizing their losses and maximizing their gains. The public response to each work is still random, but since they control what is available at the box office, they can still find success.

Now that distribution is so simple a clever 12 year old can do global distribution in their spare time as a hobby, and the publishers don't have control over what options the audience has any more... they are destined to fall apart. It's not the content that made $90m shows possible, and no one remembers the $90m flops. That was entirely a matter of keeping the field of options limited and exercising control over distribution channels.

This isn't correct. $90 million TV shows exist because after a studio creates that show, they have the exclusive legal right to sell it to distribute that content. Otherwise, nothing stops Netflix from just taking Game of Thrones for free and putting it on their own platform.

I think you're side-stepping the issue. If no one is interested in watching the $90m show, it fails regardless of whether everyone or only one outlet can make it available. It has to have public popularity in order to even get to the starting line of there being some contention over which avenue through which it is distributed.

The actual outcomes of cheaper distribution have been realized as less equal outcomes: the biggest hits are bigger than ever, the rest are part of an ever-increasing undiscovered long tail.

Even though distribution is cheap, when the product is consumable entertainment, you are competing on the basis of marketing for people's attention, which is a scarce resource. Capital can buy up attention through a variety of means:

* A saturation advertising blitz around release(as was realized with 1989's Batman campaign, and repeated countless times since). Rather than just release the product with a standard press kit, go all out: advertise a pre-event event, like a panel at a fan convention. Make secondary products that serve as loss leaders, each one creating a new advertising hook.

* Bundling and cross-promotional tactics(buy this new graphics card and get a free game!). When you have a large sales organization, you can afford the time and resources to negotiate complex deals of this nature.

* The inflated production values are the product: Avatar was a hit because it was a big, expensive, technically advanced production, and there are only so many of those in the world. Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.

* Franchise marketing: Instead of just having a piece of media, build a collection of IP adaptable to many mediums and release products for all of them, building a new hook for the brand with each release. This gives the same kind of effect as a saturation campaign, but is playing a longer game, and aims to make each release solid and more than a tie-in(e.g. why is Avengers: Endgame a record breaking hit? It's because it's the capstone to a decade of Marvel movies that build up to this moment, all using a consistent style and maintaining a similar level of quality).

While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.

So I don't see an escape from these tactics without a change in the rules of how to capture human attention. Brand building for pop culture is a hugely expensive exercise, and this has made for a market that fights tooth and claw to get a small promotional edge. But like with other lines of business, waves of opportunity come and go that allow new products to get through, and Game of Thrones is one such example of the wave of "prestige TV" that appeared around the end of last decade.

>Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.

Statistical analysis suggests it is really just the same risk as a small production: 50/50. For every Avatar, there is a Waterworld.

>While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.

That, too, has been extensively studied. For every star-studded mega-hit, there is a star-studded mega-flop... and a mega-hit populated only by unknown first-time actors. Once you look at all the data, there really isn't anything you can do to budge the needle. Big stars will not increase your chances of success. Big budgets will not increase your chances of acclaim. The only studies that have shown actual predictive power before the release of a media property dealt with Tweets sent within 48 hours of the public release. And obviously, it is quite a bit too late at that point to make funding decisions. This fact isn't new, history is littered with tales that show that even those whose sole career it is to spot and publish successful works have horrendous track records. I just read last night that in the 1970s, the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was submitted over 200 times to publishers and once someone did agree to publish it, they expected to make no money on it. It almost instantly became the best-selling philosophy book of all time. Not even the most stellar hit can be spotted beforehand.

The book 'A Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' has a couple chapters about this and I think explains it quite well. The main issue is that the audience is never the same. If a film hits the theater this week versus next week, the available audience is fundamentally just not the same people. Few people go to the theater every single week, so your ability to really nail the tastes of the audience of this weekend won't help you if you release the following weekend. They back this up with research, specifically including research about the factors you mentioned like star power, production budget, etc. The publishing industry has always been ruled by superstition because that's how human beings respond when put in a position of total randomness. They will say that certain publishing companies CEO is a 'tastemaker' and 'knows what the people want'... analysis, however, shows that the CEOs who had this reputation were actually benefitting from the success of projects started under the tenure of the prior CEO, then when the projects they themselves backed got made and didn't perform as well, they "hit a cold streak", left, then the next exec started getting credit for their later projects, and the cycle repeats itself. If you're in that industry and looking to make a career, it's hard to build upon an honest "well, I will roll the dice and hope for the best", so fanciful mythmaking is essentially encouraged.

I'm not aware of research specifically controlling for the random response of the public and examining the influence of marketing alone. It would be interesting to see. A battle for peoples attention is absolutely what it boils down to once the publishers lose control of distribution and can no longer meaningfully restrict what options the audience has which was always their primary means of ensuring a positive return despite random outcomes from each individual effort.

> it's nonsense to argue that "there is no evidence that intellectual property in any way increases production of works"

Please, offer the evidence, then. As it is nonsense to claim otherwise, it should be easy to come with unambiguous peer-reviewed research on this. (I'm not actually holding my breath here. All evidence I have ever seen reduces to assuming that IP increases production of immaterial goods. I am happy to be proven wrong here.)

Sure, I'll quote the original source linked to above from economist David Levine (who makes the case against copyright):

"we find that France, where copyright is introduced, the number of composers per million increased substantially more than in other countries."

I'm cherry picking this quote, but then again, this entire book cherry-picks examples that work in their favor.

I'm not arguing that patent or copyright law are correct. I think the patent system in particular needs a lot of reform. And copyrights are way too long.

What I am arguing is that copyright (specifically, I'm not getting into patents) helps creators profit off of their work, and that profit motive induces people to create content in the first place, at least some of the time. I'll add that from a moral perspective, I think that if you write a book, Amazon shouldn't be able to copy your book and start selling it for free without reimbursing you. Economist Grew Mankiw notes that he spoke with the authors of the book linked to above and asked (I assume jokingly) if they would mind if he made copies of the book and sold them for a profit and the authors didn't feel that that would be fair within the current system.

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."—Stewart Brand, in a conversation with Steve Wozniak, recorded by Steven Levy at the first hackers conference in 1984. Source: https://digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be-fr...

That's not how capitalism works. The profit incentive, in it's most idealized form, produces books that make money, written by people who make more money writing books than anything else.

That doesn't optimize for "literary quality" at all. It optimized for authors like Dan Brown and G. R. R. Martin, authors who can write books than can be converted into media and merchandise with higher profit margins than books.

The quality stuff also doesn't get written without copyright. Take Charles Dickens, who rallied against pirating of his works. Luckily he had the protection of British copyright law, so he still had motivation to publish.

Or take the Godfather, a movie that cost $6 million to make in 1972, which was a significant sum. Do you think the studios would have put up the money otherwise?

Yes, our current system optimizes for Marvel comics movies and tabloids, but there's also a significant market for high brow stuff, and those people should be entitled to a fair living from the right to exclusively own their work. Otherwise, some of them simply won't be able to afford to that work and we'll lose it.

Before the advent of copyright, we had wealthy patrons who supported the arts. Beethoven had many patrons who helped him along (I have no doubt that he loved doing it, but perhaps wouldn't have been able to without support). But is this system really better than what we have now? It just means that instead of the market dictating what gets made, a select group of wealthy people do. Doesn't seem like an ideal system either.

Finally, there are things like Patreon, which are a more democratic way to support content creators. But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off. Very few people make a decent living off of patreon and even among those who do, how often can they pay expenses such as editors and the other support staff who help to make great art. At least in the old system, you can get some prestige and bragging rights from being the guy who supports Beethoven. However, there's not much prestige in donating $5/month to your favorite author on Patreon (even though I think it's the right thing to do).

> But at the end of the day, there's a free-loader problem where I can benefit from your donation, so this system hasn't really taken off.

Many crowdfunding systems are in fact specifically designed to be resilient against the free-loader problem. The work doesn't get funded at all unless enough people pitch in, and it doesn't cost you anything to "pledge" support for a work that doesn't make its funding threshold. So, it's rational for anyone who has a genuine interest in the work getting made, to pitch in for it - the only agents who get to "free ride" are marginal contributors who would have little interest in the work in the first place.

Rather, I'd argue that crowdfunding (1) is still an emerging model for supporting creators, so we shouldn't be so quick as to label it "unsuccessful" and (2) to the extent that it doesn't routinely fund multi-million dollar content like Game of Thrones-like TV shows or AAA videogames, that's because these media formats themselves are way too costly to make in the first place for users to be willing to transparently fund them - such that they're routinely outcompeted by cheaper alternatives!

I'd agree with this. But in that case it isn't free information. I mostly take people issue with people who say that all information should be free, yet still expect there to be a viable way to make the economic incentives right. Crowd sourcing doesn't really work for that.