The Writer of the Future
books.substack.com
books.substack.com
The two profitable price-quality points are:
- Cheap content for the masses (lowest common denominator, ad supported)
- Deep content for the vested (at a high price point)
"The middle" graces you with:
- High cost to produce (research, depth, diction)
- Limited audience
- Zero willingness to pay
A writer demanding the world take them seriously is the last step on the way down.... performance begets entitlement, not the reverse. There are critical writers in the business world: those who write landing pages, build core content, drive desirable activity. They are often very well paid and - in the event they aren't - are frequently positioned to go out on their own as an independent publisher. It's the ones that write what in retrospect was the filler who tend to complain....
But they want $45 for a one-year subscription to get book reviews. I have a hard time parsing that. Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Also, I can't see what forms of payment they accept, unless I provide an email address. Probably not Bitcoin, I'm guessing.
[EDIT] also the author's misunderstood some things here:
> Information, said the pioneers of digital reading, wants to be free.
> [....]
> the axiom that information means to be free determined that the economy of digital media would be based on advertising.
That's not really what that meant, and whatever actual dedication to information freedom that's manifested in tech circles has nothing whatsoever to do with advertising taking over the web.
I clearly remember the first online ads. And there was nothing ideological about it.
Edit: missing word
And anyway "information wants to be free" is more descriptive than it is ideological. It's a statement about what tends to happen to information. Cheap Internet access and cheap storage have changed how that works so much that it's qualitatively different from the previous status quo ("the medium is the message") but the tech creating that would've probably looked pretty similar regardless of whether the inventors thought it was wrong to pay for information (which I doubt most did anyway).
[EDIT] TL;DR: "information wants to be free" isn't a statement about the ethics of charging money for information, and the reasons that advertising won on the web and the reasons monopolies took those over rather than even small or midsized publications being able to continue getting by with their own ad sales desk wouldn't have anything to do with anyone subscribing to that notion anyway. It's an entirely incorrect association.
But now that I think of it, ads do reflect the fact that "information wants to be free". But in this case, it's information about users, which gets monetized through behavioral advertising markets.
Even if the Free Software movement (which I think is what she's trying to get at?) sometimes bleeds over into other areas, its ideological roots are in retaining user control of software in particular because software's a tool, not keeping people from charging money for novels or history books or newspaper articles or whatever.
[EDIT] that is, actual ideological informational-freedom anarchists—that is, not just opportunistic pirates—are rare and aren't and have never been in power to any substantial degree, even in the software world. The whole premise of that part is a big misunderstanding.
But how could there be? With 1985-2000 tech, and remembering how pretty much every DRM scheme so far's either failed miserably or been so invasive and flakey that it'd never have been accepted for mass media, and that even the failures have made "legitimate" products worse than their pirated counterparts. We have subscriptions—that hasn't helped much. We can very effectively gate off pages from those we don't want to see them.
It's not Information Freedom folks trying to stick it to those who want to charge money for writing any more than the record industry was trying to weaken the social value of semi-skilled music-playing family and friends. Both happened but that wasn't the point, it's just how things shook out.
I'm very open to arguments that either of those was bad and maybe even that their harm isn't made up for by the benefits the two technologies provide, but to whatever extent the Web is anti-author or anti-creator it's not some conspiracy (in the usual sense—I don't mean that as a slight) but just what it is. The printing press hurt some people. Recorded music hurt some people. Film and talkies hurt some people. I don't think anyone developing film audio recording & sync technology, or even those involved in its use, were much interested in harming a bunch of silent film actors per se, right? But how would you even develop that tech without doing so? You'd make it way different and much worse somehow, I guess, if it could be done at all. Same here.
Like the subscribers to the London Review of Books ($49 US / year), the New York Review of Books ($89 US / year), or the LA Review of Books? ($100 US / year for a quarterly, if I'm not mistaken).
There are lots of people who are serious enough about books to pay these kinds of prices, and the price they're asking is around market (though maybe a little high for digital only).
My question is this: Are they as good as these other very famous publications?