Comment Re:Rubbish (Score 1) 250
"Absolutely and unambiguously make writing and publishing a zero-sum game"
Um, no - the more readers, the more money. It's not zero sum at all from the writers' point of view.
Actually, it always was a zero-sum game within any given pool of readers. Each individual has some amount of money that they are willing to spend buying books, and if they buy one author's books, it reduces the available funds that can be used to buy another author's books. The subscription model that Amazon is adopting changes the model by paying authors , not when their work is purchased, but when it is read. This changes the way a book is valued by its author; previously, once the book was sold, the author has no direct interest in how many times the purchaser reads it. Under Amazon's model, readers no longer own their books; they effectively rent them anew each time they want to read them. And a book that would have been purchased, read once, and binned to go to a second-hand bookstore has less value to an author than a book that would have been re-read again and again over time. And there are two ways for authors to respond to this change -- they can produce works that are worth reading again and again, or they can produce more books for Amazon to 'charge' for. As Scalzi points out, we are seeing authors, resigned to the lack of quality and rereadability of their work, breaking books up into chunks so that each piece of the book can be counted as a separate publication for the purposes of receiving payments. It will work to the detriment of the 'story collection' books -- why should an author publish an e-book that collects a dozen of their stories, when they can get a dozen times the 'read count' by publishing each story individually? Other authors might break up books into chapters as individual publications to artificially boost their 'read count', or write shorter stories instead of novels. By treating all works as equal, regardless of size, the payment method encourages authors "gaming" the system to artificially inflate the number of times their works have been read.