Somewhere in behind what you and Walt are talking about – private ownership of created content – is an interesting conversation on what libraries are for – or will be for as new mediums emerge.

Anyway, I’m guessing it’s still a minor issue. My perception is that having books on tape or CD (two other easily copied mediums) hasn’t hurt either book sales or the circulation numbers for hard-copy texts.

I’ve been trying to listen to the first of the Massey lectures by Alberto Manguel on this iPod I was given. I’ve had to re-start a few times after missing bits. It’s not really doing the trick for me either. “City of Words”, the print version, is going on my Christmas list.

I did listen to a short podcast required for work; short recordings seem acceptable. It occurred to me that this is the same phenomenon as on-line print — as long as it is a short snippet, for practical purposes, digital representation is acceptable. For anything else, print is preferable. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but this seems like further evidence that as long as a work is sufficiently rich or complex, the full length digital versions can only serve to increase sales.

Creative Commons is a set of balances–offering creators to explicitly yield some rights while retaining others. I think CC is a great thing, and nearly all of my online content carries CC licenses (albeit not quite up to date).

Funny thing about audio. I’d probably be a pretty decent narrator–I have an announcer’s voice–but since I’m no good at *listening* to podcasts and the like, it would never occur to me to *create* an audiobook (or a podcast). Doesn’t mean I don’t think they make sense–they just don’t work for me.

As you say, no writer should feel compelled to give away their work, and I don’t think any publisher would want to feel forced either. As I see it, it’s a marketing strategy to promote sales. It won’t work for all kinds of books. I will read a short piece on-line any day before dishing out a penny for it. It’s only the more substantial works that would benefit from this approach.

I would never have read “Balanced Libraries” on a screen, just in print. Would I have bought it if I could have heard it for free in audio? Hmmm, depends the narrator I suppose.

That’s the model that just doesn’t work for most authors, for the narrators that make audiobooks worth listening to (“just throwing up” an audiobook version of a book isn’t all that easy, unless the robotic text-to-speech version is acceptable), for the producers that make it all work.

Cory Doctorow and Baen Books have generally found that giving it away works. I’m guessing that in niche markets that just might not be true–and in any case, I don’t feel that people should be compelled to give it away. Speaking personally, it’s not whether I can make all of my living (clearly not) as opposed to part of it from published writing–it’s whether I can get enough return on my investment in time to make it worthwhile. For truly creative works, maybe the creation is reward enough; for a lot of worthwhile nonfiction, that’s just not the case.