Pixel-Stained Peasant Wretch, Etc. Dept.

A recent column by Paul Krugman in the Times noted that in the digital age, the old business models of delivering content are going to die no matter what anyone wants:

Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

A subsequent letters column contained many reactions:

It is already next to impossible for the bulk of writers to make a living just writing. If they don’t have the stomach or talent for self-promotion and hawking related paraphernalia, they’ll have to spend even more hours working at something else ... Are we facing a future in which only the independently wealthy can aspire to be writers? Sad.

-- but --

Charles Dickens is regularly cited as the forerunner of the digital business model that calls for authors to make money from related activities like lecturing, as profits from book sales erode.

In short, it's looking like the market for books is going to become more and more like the market for music -- where the book sales are just the loss leader, and the real moneymaker is in the bonus goodies, like being able to see your favorite content creator in meatspace (man, I never thought I'd use that term).

And as far as making a career out of it goes, well, I've still got my day job and don't plan on leaving that anytime soon. I thought for a long time about the consequences of trying to become a full-time writer of fiction, and realized it probably wasn't a smart idea to hitch my livelihood to the shifting winds of public taste. I'd like to be able to write what I like without having to worry about whether or not it means being able to eat this month, too.