LISNews: Librarian News

Cory Doctorow says You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen! He writes:

There's a generation of web writers who produce "pleasure reading" on the web. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are enraging. Most dwell in Sturgeon's 90th percentile and below. They're not writing novels. If they were, they wouldn't be web writers.

Mostly, we can read just enough of a free e-book to decide whether to buy it in hardcopy — but not enough to substitute the e-book for the hardcopy. Like practically everything in marketing and promotion, the trick is to find the form of the work that serves as enticement, not replacement.