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Nice Blog Essay on Macropayments vs MicroPayments

Screenshot - 9_5_2008 , 8_04_16 AM_thumb.png
Writer Cory Doctorow has an important blog essay up today about the downsides of writers trying to solicit payments directly from readers to support their work.

The essay touches on many of the issues I raised in my article on the first year of DonationCoder and our attempt to set up a donation-funded website here.

To concretize the metaphor: I don’t care about making sure that everyone who gets a copy of my books pays me for them — what I care about is ensuring that the everyone who would pay me decent money for a book has the opportunity to do so. I don’t want to hold 13-year-olds by the ankles and shake them until their allowance falls out of their pockets, but I do want to be sure that when their parents are thinking about a gift for them, the first thing that springs to mind is my latest $20-$25 hardcover...

More well thought out stuff worth excerpting about how the relationship changes when you ask for money, and not always in a good way..

http://www.locusmag....w-macropayments.html


I guess my main point of divergence with Cory is not in his laying out of the problems, but in what it sounds like he is saying is a viable solution: give away the digital media and hope the publisher can convince the rich fans people to buy tshirts and gold leaf leatherbound hardcopies.

The essay, at least from my standpoint, feels like it's only half complete.. it lays out well some of the serious problems with collecting micropayments (or microdonations), but doesn't really try to come up with a working framework -- other than to suggest that a writer can make their real money when the fans with lots of money buy the extras (special editions, tshirts, etc.).

To me, that is a problematic solution to the problem, with it's own negative repercussions.  It puts much more pressure onto the role of marketing and hype and advertising to sell all this garbage like tshirts and stuff unrelated to the actual content of what's being produced.  What happens when the actual writing by the author becomes merely the way to sell action figures?

I just think we would be a healthier society if we could figure out a way to make it possible and easy and fun and a rewarding experience to be able to contribute directly to the authors of the work we like.

Many of the worries Cory has about what happens when an author "convinces" someone to pay for their material but then the "customer" gets home and decides they don't like it, disappear if you let people donate AFTER they decide they like the work -- so it's not like their aren't alternatives.

To me, the fundamental impediments to artists/writers making enough money to survive on donations is a combination of the difficulty in users making such donations (without worrying about security), and the mindset that has developed that everything should be either expensive or free (and supported by ads).

Click here to read the full post and discuss..

posted by mouser donate to mouser
discovered on http://www.boingboing.net/
(permalink) (read 3 comments)


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