Yesterday, Apple gave us the iPad, and I believe it’s only a matter of time before our comics will do all that. The examples in the keynote made it clear that the days of static pages are over. I don’t think there’s any reason to go fully animated for comics (that’s what cartoons are for), but creators will be able to take advantage of slick transitions and other effects that can really enhance the reading — or even the entire storytelling — experience. Guys like comiXology have their app zooming and panning around a comic, but that’s just scratching the surface.

I’m not convinced this will replace the Wife’s beloved Kindle, mostly because I’m not convinced the iPad will be as comfortable to read for long periods (the iPad is backlit, the Kindle is not) or as easy to read outdoors. The Kindle is also cheaper and, at least for the moment, has a much larger selection of books available. (The Kindle DX, however, is toast. The newspaper and magazine outlets wanted a bigger tablet, but they also wanted color, and the DX just doesn’t cut it.)

I wonder, too, what it will do for short prose fiction. If magazines and newspapers are going to go all out developing for this thing, why not anthology magazines or fiction websites? Grab something like the new Crimefactory zine and read it on the go, just like you might for the Kindle. With the iPad, editors could also post video interviews and other extras you may be able to post to the web but you just can’t do on a Kindle.

I don’t see the iPad replacing my laptop (or desktop, for that matter), but I can see it being a great supplement. I love my iPod touch, but I still can’t edit docs on it. With Pages available for the iPad, I can easily use it to edit files, or even create in a pinch while on the road. I’d have to play with the keyboard dock and/or a Bluetooth keyboard to give any real thought to long-form creation on it, such as writing an entire novel, but the real problem is I need the multitasking to be truly functional on it.

That said, the multitasking isn’t a deal killer. I don’t need multitasking on the road, or if I’m lugging it around at a convention. I can prop it up on a table and let it display artwork all day on a 10-hour battery, or hand it to an editor and let him flip through art or page samples. I can also hold and use it like a clipboard with little effort while walking around a con floor or waiting in line somewhere. These would be unwieldy at best with a laptop, even a netbook.

Kiss netbooks goodbye, for that matter. For $100 or so more, I’d much rather have an iPad. Netbooks are underpowered, for the most part, and you’re still wrestling with a laptop form factor only tinier. True multitasking would bog down the iPad, just as it does most netbooks. If I didn’t have a MacBook at work, I’d purchase an iPad for myself and use it as the supplement to my iMac rather than spending double or more on a full-size laptop. I’d much rather carry the iPad on a plane, too. Laptops are a tight fit on those trays, especially if you’re a larger person or if the guy in front of you leans his seat back.

As an educator, I’d much rather put an iPad in the hands of my students in a 1:1 environment. Why?

1. The cost is less than half of a MacBook and they will be far easier to manage (based on existing iPod/iPhone deployment tools, anyway)
2. With textbook deals coming, students will be able to carry and read all their books on it
3. It’s set up for annotation and in-classroom note taking
4. It will have all the current features of the iPod touch, such as classroom response, apps, iTunesU, and so on
5. The lack of multitasking keeps students on task (in theory)
6. Schools will still have labs for multimedia work and things like yearbook and business classes, so heavy-duty composition can be done there

Some say printing may be an issue, but I say no. Just ten years ago, Palm wanted every student to have a Palm device and beam their papers, etc., to the teacher via infrared. If the iPad will dump files to a server store for the teacher, that’s all they need, and is more efficient. This saves on paper (not to mention toner, which, believe me, is a huge expense for a school district), and is less junk for the teacher to haul home to grade.

Our coaches will kill for sports statistic apps on one of these. They carry it along the sidelines and tap a player’s name to tweak their stats. Little to no typing would be required if it’s handled right. Heck, with the right app and programming, they’d have quick access to plays, replays, and field/court diagrams.

As for some of the other criticisms, I think people are being a bit harsh.

Take the bezel, for example. Yeah, it’s pretty big, but given the size of the thing your thumbs will have to overlap the screen to hold it properly, and you’d have a lot of accidental input. Saying you won’t buy this thing because of the bezel is like saying you wouldn’t sleep with Shakira because she has small tits.

No camera? Yeah, kinda sucks. But Apple’s not stupid, so I think there’s a reason for this. I decided to test out a theory and set my MacBook Pro in my lap so the screen would approximate where I’d hold the iPad. I fired up the Photo Booth app, and the following is the first picture I took while holding the screen in a way I can read the display.

Talk about negative space...

Tilt the display so I can see my whole face, and parts of the screen start looking dim. I wouldn’t be able to see the person talking to me very well.

That was taken holding the screen in landscape mode. I turned it on its side and tried again. This one’s a little better…

I can see my brain!

…but you can see right up my nose. It’s not exactly the most flattering angle in general. So why include a camera if the only way you can use it is to hold it straight out in front of you? Users would be bitching about their arms getting tired in no time. Yeah, it would work on a dock, but you know most people aren’t going to be buying docks.

A camera on the back wouldn’t be much better. Something that big would be unwieldy to aim, and probably introduce more shake than you’d want with what would amount to a cell phone camera. Again, it would be an opening to more gripes than compliments. You want a tiny, portable camera off your phone? Try a Flip or an iPod nano. Or a real camera like an Elph.

Then there’s the name. The jokes are already all over the Internet, but MadTV already covered this one for us:

“Vaginal firewall protection” indeed. Smooth, Mr Jobs. Tablet or Slate, with or without an i in front of them, would have been much better.

Next there’s the AT&T thing… Even Hitler’s not happy about that one. But can you blame him? We couldn’t get decent AT&T coverage where I live if our lives depended on it. You would think Apple learned their lesson with all the iPhone complaints. But hey, at least they found people a cheaper data plan. Dump a USB cellular modem and the iPad pays for itself in about a year and a half.

Another reason I think this thing is going to do well is the interface. I’ve played with an iPod touch for a while now, and it still amazes me how easy it is to use. I taught the Midget to use it in all of ten seconds, and he in turn taught the Squirt — who was four at the time — how to do the same thing. With no input from me, they were switching apps and playing games like pros. Even my three-year-old daughter effortlessly dumps pygmies off the island in Pocket God, then creates more so she can do it again.

The interface is what killed previous generations of tablets, whether we’re talking about the Newton or the round of tablets the PC industry tried to foist on us around 2000-2002. (They tried to foist them off on the education sector, anyway.) They were unwieldy, heavy, buggy, and in many cases you had to have a stylus, which itself was just an afterthought bolted on to Windows. Handwriting recognition may have been huge in its day, but you had to learn your way around its idiosyncrasies, especially when they revamped the input alphabet like Palm did. Handwriting recognition was just too inconsistent from user to user, but anyone can learn to swipe.

That said, I’m still intrigued by Microsoft’s Surface. It shows they’ve put a lot more thought into touch technology, and if they integrate the touch features into their new tablet devices, I may be willing to give it a second glance. It’s just tough to be positive after the horrible (IMHO) WinMo interface on most of their mobile devices. (5 minutes with a Sprint Mogul was enough to ensure I’d never go anywhere near one again, and I just needed to make a phone call.)

I know there’s probably going to be a better version out within six months of releasing this one. I know I’m paying into a closed system. But damn it, I want one of these.

Pass the Apple Kool-Aid.

And she's downloaded my stuff already, of course!

I debated waiting, but with reviews iffy on the Nook and both the Wife and I already hooked into Amazon, it made sense to go ahead and pull the trigger. I think the only thing that may trump the Kindle at this point would be the much-rumored Apple tablet/iSlate, but I seriously doubt the price point will be as low as the Kindle’s. There’s a good chance I’d be able to purchase a tablet/iSlate at work for evaluation anyway.

I think my wife will be a good test of the true usability of the device. She’s not tech stupid by any stretch, but she’s also not a tech enthusiast. Technology is a tool to her, nothing more, and if it’s a pain in the ass to use, she’s not going to mess with it. She’s also a voracious reader who will sometimes go back and re-read books simply because she hasn’t had time to visit a bookstore or hasn’t bothered to place an Amazon order. She reads on the couch, at the kitchen table, and in bed, so she’ll test it in a variety of environments.

Her initial reactions have been favorable. She’d only seen the Sony reader’s screen in the past, and she immediately noticed the Kindle’s has better contrast and faster response times. She’s found the interface intuitive, she hasn’t once come to me to help her find or do something, and she’s already downloaded two books (including The Pack: Winter Kill, of course) and explored how bookmarking works.

In fact, she’s been coming up with potential problems and has been attacking them, only to discover the folks at Amazon have already anticipated these problems. She probably knows more about the Kindle than I do at this point.

Next we’ll see how she feels about it after using it for a couple of weeks.

I would love to have a platform like this to work with comics. Not necessarily as a replacement for floppies, but imagine the extras you can pack in to a graphic novel, comics anthology, or even a complete set (or subset) of a given publisher’s weekly comics. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:

• Animated sequences or alternate paths/endings (think Choose Your Own Adventure)
• Swipe-through pin-up galleries (with more pin-ups)
• Bring back the letters page with more complete fan-generated content like videos
• Bonus content such as creator profiles with video and/or audio & photos
• Bonus story content like character profiles, references to previous issues, histories, games, etc.
• Behind-the-scenes content such as pencils, inks, and other “process” features
• Dynamic layout control (think different ways to lead a reader’s eye through the story)
• Zoomable panels/pages for “hidden” content, such as clues, gags, or Easter eggs
• Moveable POVs and changing perspectives within a panel (including using this as a method to lead the reader through the story)
• Word balloon and caption toggling (instant silent comic, whether for the story or to savor the artwork)
• Grabbing pages, panels, splashes, etc., as screensavers and wallpapers for the reader device or other devices owned by the reader
• Premium editions that might be ad-free, or feature separate bonus content

Whatever the final content included, the key is the publishers and creators are no longer limited to page counts and printing costs, and in many cases, margins won’t be sacrificed to distributors and to shipping costs. Instead, more of the start-up money goes where it belongs: into content creation. Under the traditional publishing model, the creators get a small slice of the pie, which is a shame given the content they create is what generates the sales in the first place.

As for distributing this new content, there are plenty of options. Guys like Robot Comics are already doing exciting things on the small-screen digital market, but a “full-size”, dedicated e-reader opens up many more possibilities. Content subscriptions could be pushed out just as magazines and newspapers are with the Kindle. Intermediaries like iVerse and comiXology can handle indirect distribution, and larger publishers can probably host items directly (not to mention make use of the iPhone App Store, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble’s online store).

Where does that leave comic shops, you ask? I hear you, I’d hate to see my favorite shops like Amazing Fantasy, Graham Crackers, Darktower, and Comix Connection take a nosedive, too.

For starters, they’ve got a while before they have to sweat because print’s probably not going anywhere any time soon. Despite the success of the Kindle and the sudden proliferation of e-readers, we’re not seeing any decrease in the appearance of print books, are we? Digital distribution may finally have put a dent in music CD sales, but we’re certainly not seeing empty CD racks at Best Buy and Borders. Retailers still sell the hell out of DVDs, and while most games are available digitally, we’re not seeing the game shops in a panic yet. There’s also no reason the shops couldn’t help distribute the digital content, just like Barnes & Nobel plans to do with the Nook at its brick & mortar stores.

Even if digital distribution did put a major dent in the print sales, there’s still going to be a niche market for print (think of all the people still seeking out 8 tracks, and the recent resurgence in vinyl interest). Purists will pay a premium for print, and this is where your signed, limited editions come in. Include color plates, hand-written material, and so on, and you’ve got a product fans will seek. An increase in margin would help offset the loss in volume, and still bring people in for the rest of the stuff.

Which brings us to the next item: merchandising. Fans are going to need a place to pick up t-shirts, action figures, and other tchotchkes the content tends to generate.

Finally, and most importantly, there’s the cultural connection. The best comic shops have a reason for people to show up there and talk comics, including signings and special events like 24 Hour Comics Day. They host gaming tournaments, or they play host to podcasters and media folks like Darktower hosts the Around Comics guys. The cooler publishers and creators will play it smart, using comic shops to host launch parties and similar celebrations, simultaneously pleasing their fans and supporting the shops.

Is it all that easy? Hell, I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud here, but it would be a shame to have these shiny new toys and still see publishers just handing us the same static content and 22-page story fragments.

Not too bad for a product that, by some accounts, should be dead before it even launched.

I should probably qualify that statement. The people I run into who claim the e-book “fad” won’t last are all bibliophiles. They don’t just read books, they collect them. I will readily admit that I’m as much a collector — or at least an accumulator — of bits of dead trees stamped with ink and glued/sewn together myself, so I don’t fault them for it. However, it doesn’t take a big brain to figure out e-books are here to stay.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble are playing their cards close to the vest, so it’s tough to say how many units they’ve actually sold. However, with every major publisher and many smaller presses on the bandwagon, it’s tough to believe they aren’t doing well. Keep in mind, the Nook not only sold out before the holidays, but it sold out in pre-order. They have yet to get a physical unit into anyone’s hands, including reviewers’, and they’ve still sold every unit scheduled to ship out of the factory. That’s the kind of scenario every business dreams of.

The bibliophiles may dismiss electronic books, and the e-readers may have their shortcomings for the moment, but it amazes me the variety of demographic I’ve seen for these things. Technophiles are among the first in line, of course, but I’ve also seen some other writers and book lovers toting them around. I know of schools buying units for classrooms, including elementary grades. There are colleges putting them in the hands of incoming students. At work, we’ve got a retired teacher who can’t say enough about her Kindle, and she can barely negotiate her way around the Windows desktop. She subbed in our junior high building one day and had all of the other teachers drooling over her shiny white e-reader in its little leather folder. My wife and my mom both tear through novels and could care less what happens to the actual books after they read them. They’re both waiting to see if and how Amazon responds to the Nook’s color LCD, and they’ll both most likely own one or the other sometime next year.

E-books are a win-win for voracious readers. They can carry most of their library with them, and they get instant gratification when searching for a title. If they get 100 pages into a book and decide it’s garbage, with just a couple of clicks they’re reading a different book, even if they’re sitting in the park or riding on a bus or train. I hear the bibliophiles complain about battery life issues, but I have yet to hear a Kindle owner offer up any real complaints about it beyond “Eh, I’ll plug it in when I get home.”

From a writer’s perspective, why ignore them? I’ve talked to a couple of guys now who could care less if their books are on the Kindle because they think e-books won’t last (see bibliophiles above). Okay, let’s say Amazon sold 50,000 units. I have no idea how close or far from reality that is, but it’s a nice, round number. That’s 50,000 people who are going to visit a dedicated store that will be stocking your book. You don’t have to sweat which chains are in their neighborhood and whether or not their local store is stocking your book. You don’t have to worry about whether or not they shop at a local indie store that may or may not have ever heard of your or have shelf space for your book.

Yes, you still have to make these 50,000 people aware of your book, but isn’t that better than having to make them aware of the book and having to make an effort to get it stocked? What makes the book more likely for them to stumble upon: Amazon’s Recommended, Also Bought, and Also Browsed links and thumbnails, or your book sitting spine-out among a sea of other spine-out books? Even if only 1% of those 50,000 people read the kind of material you produce, you’ve just made your book easier to find with zero effort.

Sure, it’s still supplemental at this point, and I realize the overwhelming majority of readers are still purchasing dead trees. The Barnes & Noble was packed tonight, and obviously they weren’t buying Nooks and e-books. That’s why The Pack: Winter Kill will have both a Kindle Edition and the imminent trade paperback edition. It’s not smart to ignore the e-book market, but it’s suicidal to ignore the dead tree markets.

Will that hold true in five years, though? Or ten? When they get the technology behind a vibrant color display with the same battery life as the existing grayscale displays and the costs start coming down, I imagine a lot of trees will be breathing a deep sigh of relief.

Hmm… I wonder if the Sierra Club has made that connection yet?

I just finished a long night of karate and I’m not sure I’m ever going to stop sweating. It started in class, and it was Sensei’s birthday so he decided we’d get in a really good workout and do some sparring. Two and a half hours later, most of us were dripping (especially Sensei, who sparred everyone in class one at a time — and yes, he kicked my butt). But review is next week, so shortly after I got home I warmed up again, ran two kata, and started in on all of my wazas. I really want to be ready for review next week, so I ran them all normal speed, redid the ones I messed up, then ran them all slow for refinement and muscle memory.

So yeah, long night.

As I’m cooling down I’m composing this on my iPod touch. I found a WordPress app and so far it’s working like a champ (unlike the BlackBerry WP app). Writing in landscape mode on the on-screen keyboard is very quick, especially with the built-in word recognition. Faster even than on my CrackBerry physical keyboard. I really wish either AT&T would fix their coverage out here or that their exclusive contract would end because I’d buy an iPhone in a heartbeat. Evernote and WordPress on this touch could very well become my killer apps.

Enough rambling. Time to hit the shower. This weekend is bachelor weekend and I’ll need to be well-rested for the carnage.

Turns out the owners can generate the hydrogen in their own home with a natural gas co-generator. Dubbed the Home Energy Station, this cool gizmo will provide heat and power to your home as well as keep you on the road. Not too shabby!

Then I took a closer look at the accompanying illustration, which appears to be some Honda vision for the future. There’s the co-gen station, solar panel roof, the car, and of course an ASIMO robot.

Just when you thought it was safe to leave your daughter alone...

Does nobody else see something sinister afoot? Take a look at Mom and Dad: she’s busy doing the dishes or cooking or something, and Dad’s busy messing with his car. Shouldn’t the robot be handling those tasks? Little Jimmy is busy in the shower. Kinda odd, Honda, but whatever. This means ASIMO has the run of the house…

…and little Jenny.

Yeah, I’ve seen Saturn 3 and I know how this works! ASIMO shirks his duties, creates his opening, and attacks! Little Jenny never knows what hit her, and two hours later she’s showing the social worker where the plastic predator touched her.

No thanks, Honda. You keep your pervy future to yourself.

When I first started using Twitter a year ago, videos like Twitter in Plain English pretty much covered it: Twitter made it easy to tell your friends what you were up to. Now it’s become a huge phenomenon used by news services and corporations, and it even makes an appearance in a new Sprint commercial. I use it to keep up with several of my friends and I follow folks I find interesting, but it’s surprised me by becoming a handy tool for getting help or making connections.

For example, John had a problem with Comcast cable several months back, and he griped in his blog and on Twitter. Suddenly Comcast Cares came to his rescue, resolving his problem and saving him some money on his cable bills (I did a little investigating and found out DirecTV is on Twitter as well). I griped about the service at Hardee’s once. Moments later, I got some replies from folks running the Hardee’s Twitter account. Today I griped about a WebEx meeting, and a WebEx rep offered to help me out. Once I made an off-hand comment about needing business cards for a convention, and VistaPrint offered me a discount via Twitter. I even made a comment about the Deadliest Warrior TV show and had one of the guys behind the show, Max Geiger, drop me a reply.

I mention cigars and I get several followers. I mention martial arts and I get several followers. I even got a free cigar after entering a quick photo contest run on CAO’s Twitter feed. I’ve got a cousin who uses it for job searches, and I get a lot of comics and writing news from several different sources. When I’m slacking off instead of writing, a couple hundred of my readers know it, and there’s a good chance at least one of them will give me a much-deserved smack upside the head. I even post my tweets to my website, and my mom and some other friends are able to keep up with what I’m up to.

Companies are not just using it as a PR and marketing tool, they’re using it as a customer relations application. It’s easy to use, and there’s a plethora of tools available to them so they don’t have to spend any money on development or upkeep. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these folks are managing the Twitter account while they’re doing routine office work.

What’s even more amazing is it’s all public. Where you’d normally send an email or pick up the phone, these companies are searching you out and both sides of the conversation are available for all the world to see. Can you imagine a company making all those calls they record “for quality assurance” public? Not gonna happen.

Of all the big social networking apps, this is the first to really move beyond just a basic social purpose. A company might set up a presence on Facebook, but it’s largely a one-way street and amounts to a big page of spam. With Twitter, you get the same interaction of a chat or phone call, but the spam side of things just doesn’t work because it’s easy to block someone you don’t want to hear from. Heck, you don’t even have to go that far: if you see someone’s a spammer, you just don’t follow them and you’ll never see their messages again. If only email were that simple!

It blows me away how far this simple little toy has come. A week ago, I’d have told you all the apps and sites built around it are ridiculous. Now that I’ve given it some thought, I’m really not surprised.

And that’s the last point I’d like to make: it’s easy to make Twitter yours. I’ve been given a hard time about not following as many people as are following me, but I really don’t care. I can’t keep up with 1500 people! Turning Twitter into a broadcast medium isn’t my goal, it’s a byproduct. I like the original idea of Twitter and I’ve stuck close to it; now I just have a couple hundred extra people listening in on the conversation.

The Internet really is changing everything.

The video explains how Better Place came to be, the plan for the cars, and the economics behind the Better Place plan versus oil over the next ten years.

Whether you think his plan will work or not, I’m glad to see he’s out there doing it rather than just letting Congress or panels of “experts” debate it until it’s too late. He makes some very compelling points and if I lived in one of the areas these cars were available, I’d be happy to look into owning one.

When their contract with their label ended, they went digital, offering both physical CDs and MP3 downloads unencumbered by DRM and copy protection schemes. Now you can download their latest album for free (in multiple formats!), they take advantage of online tools, they designed their own iPhone app, created virtual reality games for their fans, and yet they’re still turning a profit.

Here’s a great quote from the iPhone app article:

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free,” Reznor says. “But the climate is such that it’s impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?’ Now let’s work back from that. Let’s find a way for that to make sense and monetize it.”

Reznor knows the music is his bread and butter, that if he doesn’t turn a profit somehow he couldn’t afford to keep pushing out music like he does. Yet he understands that the digital market and the Interent completely changes things. How is it the distributors — the record labels, the publishers, the movie studios — are having so much trouble figuring this out? The music, books and movies — the creators’ properties — are their bread and butter, yet they guard the end product more jealously than the creators themselves.

Sure, Metallica sued Napster. The creators don’t all get it. Iron Maiden, on the other hand, encourage their fans to record their shows and share the recordings with as many of their friends as they can. Iron Maiden knows it’s all about earning mindshare, about earning those ears and eyeballs, to build success. Radiohead played with a digital distribution model as well, and despite mixed results, they saw 1.2 million downloads and the physical CD still debuted at number one on US and UK charts.

In the publishing world, I again mention Cory Doctorow. It blows me away that he can give away all of his books for free in every digital format you can imagine, yet his sales are still strong enough that Tor Books is willing to publish his work in hardcover. This runs counterintuitive to most publishers’ ways of thinking where it’s assumed that if someone can get a book for free, it will be detrimental to sales. Instead, it appears that the increased mindshare actually results in more word of mouth and, in turn, more sales (or at least downloads don’t negatively affect profit).

I recently learned Wil Wheaton’s latest book is available through Lulu, a print on demand service, in both digital and paperback formats. While POD and self publishing have been acceptable in the comics realm for some time, it’s generally frowned upon in the prose world. I’m curious to see how his numbers are looking.

The big question, of course, is how these guys are able to pull it off.

Something they all have in common is trust. They’ve built relationships with their fans over a long period of time, and they earned their ears and eyeballs long before they went digital. They already had fans lined up and eager to get their hands on their new creations. (Incidentally, it’s a good example of the 1000 True Fans theory.)

So where does that leave the rest of us?

Good question. These are interesting times to be a creator.

Through that time, I’ve been wondering when the same behavior would hit the publishing industry. The Google Book Search brouhaha came first, and it was subsequently settled. Now we have the Kindle 2 and the controversy over its text-to-speech capabilities. Neither of these have been as bloody as the music and movie entertainment battles, but they amount to the same thing: a given body fighting change they don’t understand.

And the worst part is they’ve been through this before. Why aren’t the industries learning from their mistakes? Why aren’t they partnering with digital innovators instead of trying to crush them?

It also bothers me that it’s never been proven that all this digital bootlegging has been detrimental to the industry (in fact at least one study shows file sharing does not affect music sales). They see X number of people downloaded an album/movie or may have read a book on Google, and they claim it’s Y lost dollars. Meanwhile, they have no idea how many of those people turned around and bought a copy of the real thing. They have no idea how many of them enjoyed the item and told all their friends about it, and how many of those friends turned around and bought copies.

The music and movie industries are coming around, finally doing away with DRM and coming to agreements with distributors and retailers to get their product out in such a way the consumer won’t get screwed. I shudder to think of how much money they wasted on lawsuits, studies, and encryption/restriction research that ultimately failed.

With luck the publishing industry will step up before it’s too late. Guys like Cory Doctorow give away their books in multiple electronic formats, yet still sell enough copies that Tor Books is wiling to publish his work in hardcover. That may not be a common situation, but it shows that it can be done without harming sales.

For my own work, I know for a fact Werewolves: Call of the Wild showed up on several torrent sites. Did that have a negative effect on my sales? I sincerely doubt it. I’m much more concerned about the number of people who told me they ordered copies but their comic shop never received them. That tells me if I want to be read, I can’t rely solely on the current distribution model.

Whether we’re talking books, movies, comics, or music, they’re all about one thing: grabbing ears and eyeballs. If you can get enough people to pay attention, you’re going to make a profit, regardless of how the product is getting to those ears and eyeballs and how much they’re paying for it. Theft, be it shoplifiting or digital distribution, comes with the territory. It’s a cost of doing business, and publishing has been lucky to get a free pass for this long.

Keep in mind, people are not afraid to pay for their entertainment. Take movie ticket prices, for example. I spent $27 for the Midget and I to see Monsters vs. Aliens: $9 for each ticket and the 3D glasses and another $9 for a medium popcorn and medium drink. People bitch about that, but you know what? The theater was packed, despite all the whining about the economy. Or consider the Kindle: it’s essentially a $359 bookshelf. If Kindle books average $6 a pop for titles available in mass market paperback for $8, you’d have to purchase 180 books to break even. Nevertheless, everyone I know who owns a Kindle raves about it to anyone who will listen.

Content creators who want to make a living on their properties need to concentrate on earning those eyeballs and eardrums. We need to market ourselves as best we can, and if our publishers are unwilling or unable to leverage new technologies to get our work out to our fans in every way possible, then we need to make sure our contracts allow us to do it ourselves.