ase of two novels and most of a
short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A
parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the
presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right
Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't
think it's true.

No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd
call it: "Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're
Soaking in Them] That's because I think that the shape of ebooks
to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with
text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich
and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.

I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the
future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share
them with you:

1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so
ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks
sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,
have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous
installments in their series to coincide with the release of a
new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the
backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me
about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book
far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha,
ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks
are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people
will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer
pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be
the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they
promote the dead-tree editions.

2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper
books]. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good.
Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that
he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the
other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to
me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can
copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen
readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to
build concordances of characters, places and events.

3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you
own the ebook, you don't 0w