Well there you go. Can't make a living at it. So it's a gentleman farmer's profession. A model has to have business viability to survive imo.
I know poets who make a living at their poetry--their books sell, and they are professors, and they get grants. Not many but then again they are very good at what they do.
I'm not interested in online literature, and consider it an oxymoron, it's true. There are cellphone novels selling like crazy in Japan--chapters are 75 words, so they can be read in between train stops. You could not fit a Shakespeare soliloquy on one of those.
People paid $$ to see Shakespeare's plays. Would they have been written if he could not earn a living?
Charles Dickens' great novels were first serialized in a newspaper he was paid for. Etc.
It is not corrupt to say that even the greatest works of art need to be viable financially. They do.
I gain a lot from the internet world, from text messaging on my Iphone, to easy research, to worldwide hits on my website. But the publishing world is staggering for lack of profitability, so to say there is an internet site "thriving" without any profit to be made, overlooks the key problem. You need to be fulltime at something to get very good at it. And how can you be fulltime if you can't earn a living?
Also, nothing can substitute for the tactile feel of a book, the leisure to read it, even the scent of a book fresh off the press. Turn the pages, make notes in the margin if you like. At some point ebooks will be better--if ITouch gets bigger and you can find a way to make notes with a stylus, at some point it may be better. |
