Meanwhile, I’m told the average book tends to earn most of its money quite early on. (There are some evergreens that make lots of money for authors and publishers over years and years, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.) In such a world, doing something that may negatively impact your revenue stream for a book years in the future in order to positively impact it now can make lots of sense.

How much Cory’s revenue as a writer *would* be negatively impacted by ubiquitous e-reading in the future is a matter for debate. (We’ve seen from National Academies Press’s experience that free digital copies and paid-for digital copies of the same title can coexist quite well in some cases.) But even if you grant that authors giving away their works digitally now will be hurt later, it can still make economic sense in many instances to give them away now.

It’ll be a very long time before Kindlish devices — for some, a replacement for a book — are as ubiquitous as books themselves.

By making his work ubiquitously available in digital form, Cory finds audiences his publisher could never find, by the hundreds of thousands.

Even in a world of limitless access to free information, if the potential audiences are in the billions, then even a tiny proportion preferring print retains the economic viability of the “give away digital” model.

Is a publisher required in the limitless abundance scenario? Less and less, unless they provide true convenience to the author and justification for sharing in profits.

In the content abundance world, we’ll depend more and more on our friends and communities to make recommendations, all over the world, and we’ll still give books as gifts (hard to wrap an e-book).

I’ve bought every one of Cory’s books new, from the bookstore, partly because I think we should support quality work. I even want a micropayment system that allows me to toss an online dime to people who make me laugh, or who delight me. That would certainly change the publishing world.