No Free Lunch Department: U.K. novelist Richard Herley takes shareware book site down
Richard Herley, a prize-winning U.K. writer of such lively books as The Penal Colony, hoped that the shareware model would work for his novels. It didn’t, at least not as he saw it.
Now he’s taken RichardHerley.com down and disabled the related e-mail address since he doesn’t consider the hassles to be worth it.
You can still find his works at Manybooks.net and Feedbooks. But don’t expect Richard to be offering his novels this way in the future, assuming he writes any more. Yes, he’s fed up with the mainstream publishing models, too. And, no, as a reader of The Penal Colony, I can attest that he’s no money-grubbin’ hack; and others apparently agree about the quality of his work. He simply has the bizarre belief that writers owe it to themselves and their families to be paid. While Richard made his books initially free, he expected to be paid if you liked them
The limits of "free"
I continue to be a big booster of free books. But, please, let’s have a library model, among others, to help provide fair compensation for creative people. Wowio-style ad models? Fine. but they’re hardly a full solution, just as the library model isn’t. We need a mix of models, including of course the bookstore one.
The Kindle alternative: Richard said Amazon’s terms just didn’t make sense to him. He’s also not the biggest lover of Amazon’s insistence on DRM.
Also down: The dotReader site has been unreachable for a few days. I don’t know if this is an accident or if other reasons are involved. The same company’s OSoft site remains up. I’m e-mailing OSoft CEO Mark Carey for an answer.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:54 am
What do you think about Community Pricing model by Logos Bible Software (logos.com/communitypricing). To my mind it’s very useful model for niche publications.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:08 am
How about Baen? If your stuff is good, they could definitely buy it and sell on Webscriptions. Alternatevely, there is E-Reads, which recently also started selling some of their books on Webscriptions.
Re Amazon, some people mentioned they saw books without DRM sold. So maybe you don’t have to accept their DRM if you don’t want it. (Though they still don’t offer their books to people without a Kindle.)
May 20th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Hi, Igorsk. Thanks for the Baen info. I don’t know if Richard’s work, however good, would be what Baen is after right now.
As for DRMless books at Amazon, do you have more details? URLs. If Amazon offer a DRMless option for publishers, I’d like to give ‘em credit. Minus DRM, wouldn’t we really be taking about Mobi files?
Thanks,
David
May 20th, 2008 at 11:31 am
The DRM free ebooks on Amazon seem to be limited to ebooks uploaded by individuals, not publishers.
A good rule of thumb is the filename. If the file name is numbers, then the file has no DRM and is a Mobipocket ebook. If the file has a semirecognizable name, then it probably has DRM.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Vladimir: Not sure if I’d like that model for copyrighted works, but for pub domain works, yes, it’s very intriguing. Thanks for sharing the link. David
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:43 am
In a comment above Vladimir Haritonov mentions a bidding model for releasing e-books. Ars Technica has a recent article titled Musopen puts classical recordings, scores in public domain that discusses another website that is collecting money to move items into digital form.