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In the next years, any good book is going to be pirated in the net.In fact, it is today for those that know how to search.

Finding books are going to be easier as copying a book is made simpler and more people want to do it because they have e-reader hardware(people in the hundred of millions instead that in the thousands).

So people will have two options: 1)Decide to pay what the publishers want. 2)Decide it's too much and pirate it.

In the publisher wet dreams people don't have objection to pay the same quantity of money for something that has distribution cost, material cost, manufacturing cost that for something that has virtually null copy cost. People are not stupid.

What I think it will happen is this: Authors will start selling directly, as with music there is no need for publishers now.

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Authors will start selling directly, as with music there is no need for publishers now.

I wish there was no need for publishers. Unfortunately, publishing is not isomorphic with printing/distribution. Editorial services and book design are pretty much vital to the process of turning a manuscript into something people are willing to pay money to read, and marketing is necessary if you want to convince folks to read your book, rather than Dan Brown's.

We may see a realignment of the way publishing services are applied to books (e.g.: author hires editor and PR folks to work for them, or literary agents hire editors and turn into virtual publishers -- they've got the accounting infrastructure to handle royalty payments), but we already have authors selling directly, and there's a reason most readers usually avoid self-published books.

You are right when you say marketing is important and some very good writers are very bad at it. But there are people that could do both too. There are other books that need artists(text books of history, biology...) and other support people too.

When I say there is no need for publishers I mean the hard logistics and financial experts that today are needed. Other people will be needed, like web store experts, but you don't need to have a minimum of 20000 readers to print like today.

Today, like yesterday CD labels, publishers hold the rights because they have access to the physical market and you can't sell without then, they then get all the money and no cost in ebooks. This is going to change when writers don't need physical market because people buy digital.

I am not sure of this - In the next years, any good book is going to be pirated in the net

There is so much junk published these days (how do they manage to make money with such junk, is beyond me), so if I find a good book, I want to spend money and buy it (assuming of course, that I can afford it), just to encourage the author/publisher. The quality of publishing is going to go down even further (just take a look at clickbank and other sites advertising "how to make money with ebooks").

Publishers/Authors can complain all they want, but the truth is we simply do not have authors like we had before (Frost, Dickens etc).

I can't speak for others, but if I find a good author/book I want to spend money on their books.

In fact I bet my two dollars Apple is going to start the authors ebooks market with the Apple tablet making it outdoors-friendly and using their app store tech.

  any good book is going to be pirated in the net.In fact, 
  it is today for those that know how to search.

How?

Google. You can usually find a torrent or something on megaupload.

I just got a bunch of e-books I had been trying to take out of the library for years, unsuccessfully (all the copies were missing or somesuch; they were kind of rare.)

#bookz on IRC, undernet.

http://gigapedia.com/

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