Thoughts on a community e-publishing service

[Kelise]

I thought paypal took so many fees that they would take most of that $1? At least, that's why most places that accepts donations ask that the lowest be $10US.

I think another issue would be trust. Like BL says, you send your lovely little years-work to someone you don't really know, and they could disappear. There have been cases online where someone gets the full MS of someone, fixes it up within a month or two, and starts sending it out to publishers under their own name.

What a professional author I know does, each time she sends her MS out to ANYONE whether it even be their agent, or just a beta reader, she puts something unique in the copy. That way, if it ended up online, she'd know who the culprit is. So like the watermark, something such as that could be used to deter those looking to rip it off.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

I thought paypal took so many fees that they would take most of that $1? At least, that's why most places that accepts donations ask that the lowest be $10US.

I think another issue would be trust. Like BL says, you send your lovely little years-work to someone you don't really know, and they could disappear. There have been cases online where someone gets the full MS of someone, fixes it up within a month or two, and starts sending it out to publishers under their own name.

What a professional author I know does, each time she sends her MS out to ANYONE whether it even be their agent, or just a beta reader, she puts something unique in the copy. That way, if it ended up online, she'd know who the culprit is. So like the watermark, something such as that could be used to deter those looking to rip it off.

This is why I never sent more that two chapters of anything to the same person

Also I added micro print to my things. and sent it as a pdf locked so they could not copy it or make chages to it.
All the person edting had to do was write Paragraph 3 line 8 and then tell me what was wrong or what ever. ( this was done in the body of the email. ) Some of them hated it but that's just too bad. if they want to steal my work they will have to retype the whole thing by hand LOL.

 

[Kelise]

Ahh, careful My work photocopier scans and converts to text (with 99.9% accuracy apparently, not that I've seen a mistake yet) with one press of a button. A 100+ page printed document suddenly on my computer in a word doc within minutes.

But yes, generally that would stop anyone.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

LOL yeps your photpcopy would have my lovely microprint that says Hey Screen name This was sent to you on x y date

 

[superlou]

In my experience, right click is particularly ineffective (and annoying). I once worked on a site that had a set of photographs the photographer did not want downloadable. The end result was mostly complaints from users that couldn't copy-and-paste the address text on the website into google maps.

Starconstant's OCR software is a case in point of the DRM race I'm trying to disrupt. I think maybe the thing I didn't expect is that the majority of writers want to protect their works so that they might some day be capitalized by a traditional business model in the future. Unfortunately, that's not something a site like the one I'm proposing is targeted at. I do think that a voluntary donation system could help incentivize writing and editing if we can find a way to keep paypal from skimming off too much. Paypal does indeed take a pretty large cut out of small amounts (about 0.10 on a $1 donation if I remember the number right).

However, the site does prevent someone from stealing your work and selling it under their name because it has a traceable versioning system which proves where it originated. I'd actually argue it's more secure as we are a neutral third party that has timestamps recording when you submitted a piece of work. If you hoard your manuscript and someone finds the file on an open computer, you have no recourse. Sending a draft by email has a similar problem unless you are willing to work with your email provider to track down the necessary logs. If this website handles the exchange, then there is a "paper" trail to discover the origination of each and every modification should the need arise.