of course they can. just like they did with Wikipedia. all the great novelists have day jobs, often as creative writing professors. writers make money in all sorts of ways beyond selling books. david foster wallace teaches creative writing. hunter s thompson was a journalist. and writers need lives to gain experience, they are not just dudes that write books and write more books. they go off to wars or work on the missipippi river and gain perspective. then they get a cushy job at a school and teach while they knock out the classics. plus great novelists are rarely motivated by money. do you think solzhenitsyn wrote to get rich? no, he had a story to tell. thomas pynchon isnt writing gravity's rainbow because he wants money. if he was, he would write something a helluva lot more like harry potter. (i think an argument can be made that money is actually a corrupting influence on art) and again, i didnt say writers shouldnt get paid. giving something away doesnt mean you cant profit from it. and beyond novels, all my favorite non-fiction writers are professors of some sort. steven pinker is a professor of linguistics, richard dawkins is a biology professor, HL mencken was a journalist and newpaperman. richard feynman was a nuclear physicist. they are doing these other things besides writing, learning enough to write the books. in fact without the day jobs they wouldnt have anything to write about.
today i "returned" the kindle book my friend had loaned me. now he texted me "those ****s wont let me reloan that bitch". you are restricted to one loan. thats ****ed up. keep it up publishers, you know i dont give a damn and will be more than happy to steal and distribute your **** myself.
Let the market decide. If one publisher allows 15 loans, then others will follow. People are free to choose. Most people don;t loan books at all and couldn't care less. Others who do will flock to publishers that cater to them.
if books are going to be non-loanable, and not require shipping and printing, then they should be significantly cheaper that physical books. and kindle books are cheaper, which is good, but they should be more loanable. you are right, the market will work it out, one way or another, either when the nook or whatever is more permissive and gets more business by teaming up with publishers that allow loaning, or when i steal so many books that amzon and the publishers realize they better let me the consumer have what i want or i will steal. loanability is important. people learn about books from their friends. amazon should realize this and push the publishers to allow it. i know their model is to sell the hardware cheap and profit from the books. perhaps someone else will sell a more open reader that allows all formats and destroys the efforts of the publishers to stop free distribution. i am looking at you, unscrupulous chinese electronics manufacturers.
this post is not meant to argumentative, i am only considering what is going to happen in the future. imagine there is an open-format e-reader, and publishers are pressured to allow lending the same way you can lend physical books. one at a time, but infinite times. right now if we wanted, the TF homies could all list our libraries, and mail each other books around the country. and between all of us we could do an assload of reading of each other's books and only one of us would need to buy a new book and it would make the rounds and eventually all but one of us could read it for free. i bet you guys have some books i would love to read. obviously we cant do this because it is prohibitively annyoying and costly to mail books around. but with infinite ebook lending, we could have a forum where we post what we have, with wating lists, and we all eventually get everything we want. i would buy the new harry potter and if i wasnt reading it i would lend it to lasalle and after two weeks i would get it back, and if i was busy on another book i would zap it over to mesquite tiger. and large communities of file traders would emerge, basically more efficient versions of public libraries, financed privately, but not making lots of profits for publishers.. so i dunno if publishers can ever really allow real lending. but they will have to, because thievery will become overwhelming. so what should they do? come up with a new revenue model.
supporting my argument that every journalist and english professor in america is currently writing or has written a book, and we are not in any sort of danger of loss of new book writing. at the nytimes they cant keep in anyone in the office from writing books left right and center.: "Every month, it seems, some reporter drops by my office to request a leave of absence to write a book....But still the reporters — and editors, too... Off they go to write books about wars, books about spies, books about diplomacy. Books about basketball, books about China and, coming soon, a book about basketball in China. Half a dozen books exploring aspects of the recent financial meltdown. One (and one more pending) about George W. Bush; one (and another pending) about the Obama family. We do cookbooks, travel books, puzzle books and movie guides. A book explaining the English. A book explaining the French. Books about The New York Times. We do biographies (Whittaker Chambers, Edward Kennedy, Virgil Thomson, Einstein) and memoirs (growing up in Alabama, growing up in Liberia, growing up Catholic). Cancer. Jazz. Physics. Pipe organs. Marriage. The weather. Two editors were writing books about their dogs. At the same time! " "But that does not explain why writers write them. Writers write them for reasons that usually have a little to do with money" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/magazine/bill-keller-wants-to-ban-books.html?src=recg
There is an easy solution. Books in the public domain already can be shared freely and downloaded for free or for nominal charges. This is the vast bulk of everything that has been published. Only new books by living authors need copyright protection to keep others from profiting by their work. I have no issue with infinite lending as long as a digital book is handled just like lending an analog book. If you can only lend it to one person at a time, no author has been cheated. Should you want to reprint a book (or duplicate and Ebook digitally) and distribute it to multiple people, then you must get permission from the published and pay the author his fee for each copy.
But people get paid for writing books! You make the blind assumption that people could afford to write professionally in the absence of any pay. This is simply absurd, as it would be in any other profession.
