The Sword and Laser discussion
What Else Are You Reading?
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What are your thoughts on this?
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Interesting thought. That would certainly help out authors (especially new ones). I bet your biggest problem would be the legality of the whole thing. When money changes hands, there's always plenty of regulation and red tape to go with it.
When money changes hands with the ultimate goal of going to someone else? Mountains of regulations.
Also, credibility would have to be established, so that people could be confident that all of their money was going to the intended recipient, and not being stolen.
A Spotify for books would suit someone like me who reads voraciously, but rarely re-reads apart from old favourites... I did look at Amazon Prime, but from what I can see it's ONE book a month, which is useless to someone who averages two a week. >.< Yeah, would like to find viable alternatives to read those authors I love, compensate them, AND not bankrupt myself!(PS - as a librarian IRL I get sad when the stuff I want to read isn't held in any of the local libraries, and I can't afford £3 for every one I want that they don't own... At least UK libraries pay authors back!)
Emy, I'm a voracious reader too, (2 to 3 books a week) and I ran across the same issues you mention
Joël wrote: "Emy, I'm a voracious reader too, (2 to 3 books a week) and I ran across the same issues you mention"All I shall say is:
Yep indeed ^_^I often go over my monthly "book budget".
Not that I realy care :P
I used to have the same problem. When I would ride the bus to university, I could go through two books a day. Fortunately, there was a used book store right where I could transfer buses so I could get cheap stuff to read.This stopped working when real life kicked in and I was running my own game store. It started again when I moved, had about 800 sq ft of extra space, and put it in sf&f book section all to get cheap books for myself. Over the last 30 years I can't guess how much money it has saved me. Unfortunately the ebook market is killing most bookstores but since the 7000 titles we carry represent such a minor portion of the business, I can justify it as long as it breaks even.
Not really a practical solution for the casual reader though.
Joël wrote: "Or maybe something like spotify, with the option for different subscriptions or prepaid."Interesting idea, but I hope a Spotify-type service for books would do a better job compensating authors than Spotify does music artists.
Joe wrote: "Interesting idea, but I hope a Spotify-type service for books would do a better job compensating authors than Spotify does music artists."It'd also be difficult to figure out appropriate subscription fees -- with something like Spotify or Netflix, the reason it works is because for the amount you're paying (say $10-$20/month), you can consume a lot more content than you could afford to purchase at full retail. With eBooks, given that most people probably wouldn't be reading more than 2-4 books per month, it'd be challenging to come up with a subscription fee that paid fair licensing fees to the authors but wasn't awfully close to the cost of just buying the books outright.
There's this site:http://www.aburt.com/ifiction/
" What is iFiction?
iFiction is like iTunes -- pay a small amount for some great stories. You can read the first part for free, then pay an amount determined by the author to read the rest. You can pay by Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, or PayPal.
iFiction stories are direct from the author. That means you are directly supporting authors you like, with no middleman.
Any author can sign up to use this free tool.
iFiction was created and is hosted / maintained by science fiction author Andrew Burt. "
For some years now, I have a dislike for buying e-books.
It's just that with a paper book, apart from buying the new one,
you can do a lot with it that you aren't allowed to do with an e-book.
Then There's that I often buy books secondhand, and I think that no money from this goes to the author, the same counts for lending a book from a friend.
But I don't have a lot of space to put my books, and most books I like aren't for sale in the local bookstores, so my budget to buy books get cut by shipping and traveling costs.
Not to mention the (extra) bookcases etc. to place them.
This for me, is quite the dilemma, because I do want to give the authors the money they're due.
Now I've been walking around with an idea for some time that is being cultivated in my head and I'm curious as to your thoughts.
I have absolutely no qualms about donating an author when I like his or her work.
Some authors already have a donate button on their website or blog, but I don't realy think that wil generate much donations (for most people too much fuss).
But what if there's to be a website where books are listed and you can just click on the book and donate what you like.
Or make use of websites that are already there. For example goodreads, books aplenty here already with a large community. "Just" put a donate button on the page of the book.
Or maybe something like spotify, with the option for different subscriptions or prepaid.
(a little edit: I found http://blog.readoyster.com/ seems promissing, but only for smartphones, not that that's a realy big issue :P)