A report on Fatbrain s business model and what it may mean for publishers and writers appears in the latest issue of TimeDigital magazine, and the author is skeptical yet intrigued by the notion. What Fatbrain is doing is giving writers a chance to sell their stuff on the Web, giving readers a chance to download it for a fee and giving print publishers something to lose sleep over. The latter is not a done deal, however. Nor is the former. What I mean is that we all know the names of a relative handful of popular authors and their works and we might go to a Web site to download their latest offering and pay for it.
Traditional publishers do more than merely crank out pages from a printing press.
They also act as gate-keepers, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. In the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, one writer spends an entire page extolling the virtues of grabbing digital text and reading it offline on something like the e-book. And she s not alone. I m not. Too many voices have too little of substance to add to a conversation that already overwhelms us.