Life expectancies of books, and literary podcasts
- From: John Mark Ockerbloom <ockerblo@[redacted]>
- Subject: Life expectancies of books, and literary podcasts
- Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 11:05:53 EST
Writer and editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an interesting entry this
morning on the "Making Light" blog at
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007181.html
The main essay talks about how falling out of print is the common,
often fairly rapid fate of books (with a postscript that even in a
print-on-demand era, falling out of common knowledge still can happen
pretty fast). It also argues how long copyright terms are for the most
part *not* a good thing for authors. (Key point: do you *really* want
your literary legacy held hostage by your "ex-spouse's step-grandchildren
by her third marriage"?)
Some of the points made there will be familiar to folks on this list,
but both the essay and the numerous comments (39 at this writing) are
well worth reading even just for the various notes on specific authors
and books who have been largely forgotten (sometimes deservedly so,
sometimes not), and other notes on books and books sources that readers
value.
One interesting comment had to do with a project called Escape Pod, that
buys science fiction stories (most of which have previously been published)
and gives away audio narrations of them under Creative Commons licenses.
The proprietor writes "Buying things and giving them away sounds like a
strange business model -- but in eight months we've made enough money doing
it that we've been able to raise our payment rates, put two more people on
paid staff, and we're finally forming a company for the thing.... Meanwhile,
we've had authors who keep contributing to us because they say their stories
on Escape Pod get them more fan e-mail than the original print publications."
It sounds like those authors have found that giving away some of their work
for free brings audiences back wanting more. It's certainly also one way to
help keep your work alive, as well as making the culture you value more viable
(by being more accessible) in competition against "imperalists" that have more
restrictive policies over their stuff.
The Escape Pod site is www.escapepod.org, for folks who want to check it out.
(I haven't yet, but hope to when I get some headphones handy.) I'd also be
interested in other good sources of free audio books and stories I can add
to my Audio archives listings. And I'm always interested in suggestions
of authors with online books I should catch up on.
John