* Long Term
Some day, though, paper books will all but go away. We're already
reading more words off of more screens every day and fewer words off of
fewer pages every day. You don't need to be a science fiction writer to
see the writing on the wall (or screen, as the case may be).
Now, if you've got a poor imagination, you might think that we'll enter
that era with special purpose "ebook readers" that simulate the
experience of carrying around "real" books, only digital. That's like
believing that your mobile phone will be the same thing as the phone
attached to your wall, except in your pocket. If you believe this sort
of thing, you have no business writing sf, and you probably shouldn't be
reading it either.
No, the business and social practice of ebooks will be way, way weirder
than that. In fact, I believe that it's probably too weird for us to
even imagine today, as the idea of today's radio marketplace was
incomprehensible to the Vaudeville artists who accused the radio station
owners of mass piracy for playing music on the air. Those people just
could *not* imagine a future in which audiences and playlists were
statistically sampled by a special "collection society" created by a
Congressional anti-trust "consent decree," said society to hand out
money collected from radio stations (who collected from soap
manufacturers and other advertisers), to compensate artists.
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