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. It was inconceivably weird, and yet it made the artists who embraced it rich as hell. The artists who demanded that radio just *stop* went broke, ended up driving taxis, and were forgotten by history. I know which example I intend to follow. Giving away books costs me *nothing*, and actually makes me money. But most importantly, it delivers the very best market-intelligence that I can get. When you download my book, please: do weird and cool stuff with it. Imagine new things that books are for, and do them. Use it in unlikely and surprising ways. Then *tell me about it*. Email me (doctorow@craphound.com) with that precious market-intelligence about what electronic text is for, so that I can be the first writer to figure out what the next writerly business model is. I'm an entrepreneur and I live and die by market intel. Some other writers have decided that their readers are thieves and pirates, and they devote countless hours to systematically alienating their customers. These writers will go broke. Not me -- I love you people. Copy the hell out of this thing. * Medium Term There may well be a time between the sunset of printed text and the appearance of robust models for unfettered distribution of electronic text, an interregnum during which the fortunes of novelists follow those of poets and playwrights and other ink-stained scribblers whose industries have cratered beneath them. When that happens, writerly income will come from incidental sources such as paid speaking engagements and commissioned articles. No, it's not "fair" that novelists who are good speakers will have a better deal than novelists who aren't, but neither was it fair that the era of radio gave a boost to the career of artists who played well in the studios, nor that the age of downloading is giving a boost to the careers of artists who play well live. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. I'm an sf writer: it's my job to love the future. My chances of landing speaking gigs, columns, paid assignments, and the rest of it are all contingent on my public profile. The more people there are that have read and enjoyed my work, the more of these gigs I'll get. And giving away books increases your notoriety a whole lot more than clutching them to your breast and damning the pirates.