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affordances demanded by print, albeit for a relatively small fraction of the population. Most people aren\'t and will never be readers--but the people who are readers will be readers forever, and they are positively pervy for paper. 
 
But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone wants. 
 
I don\'t think it\'s practical to charge for copies of electronic works. Bits aren\'t ever going to get harder to copy. So we\'ll have to figure out how to charge for something else. That\'s not to say you can\'t charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can\'t force a reader to pay for access to information anymore. 
 
This isn\'t the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don\'t buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day\'s equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn\'t easy. Who could have foreseen that radio\'s great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it? 
 
Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed books become obsolete--is just as hard. I don\'t know how writers would earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I\'ll never find out by turning my back on the Internet. By being in the middle of electronic publishing, by watching what hundreds of thousands of my readers do with my e-books, I get better market intelligence than I could through any other means. As does my publisher. As serious as I am about continuing to work as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They\'ve got even more riding on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my publisher with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer for them. 
 
It\'s good business for me, too. This \"market research\" of giving away e-books sells printed books. What\'s more, having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans\' tireless evangelism for my work doesn\'t just sell books--it sells me. 
 
The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities. 
 
There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers. 
 
$$$$ 
 
Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet 
 
(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) 
 
As a science fiction writer, no piece of news could make me more hopeful. It beats the hell out of the alternative -- a future where the dominant, pluripotent, ubiquitous medium has no place for science fiction literature. 
 
When radio and records were invented, they were pretty bad news for the performers of the day. Live performance demanded charisma, the ability to really put on a magnetic show in front of a crowd. It didn\'t matter how technically accomplished you were: if you stood like a statue on stage, no one wanted to see you do
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