By Sean Ferrell

Google appears ready to go head to head with the Kindle. This, according to the NPR article, is what booksellers other than Amazon have been hoping for. It will provide them with a way to sell e-books and a very wide platform from which to do it. One major difference: the business model amounts to customers paying for access to material but not actual ownership of the material.

As a writer I find myself a little thrilled by this. Assuming that I would be paid in some way for access to my work I would have little trouble with the idea that people would be paying for that access. I can imagine it increasing readership: readers might try out a chapter or two of an author that they would be hesitant to try out with an actual book purchase. So, as a writer I think it's an interesting concept and the right company to make a go of it.

However, as a reader and booklover, I feel a bit hesitant. I'm a little worried about my lack of purchasing the book itself, and what might the company's stance on a particular title do to my access to it. The potential for censorship looms (remember Amazon's "glitch" which sent dozens of books off their lists, mostly gay titles?). I understand that the market has to change, that what happened to the music industry 10 years ago must be incorporated or major publishers will find themselves, like major music publishers, dead in the water. But still, you mean I really can't "own" the book? Really? That's the solution?

I don't know what will end up being the solution, but for now the writer and the reader in me don't seem to be talking.

D.B. Grady is right, Nathan Fillion needs to be Green Lantern, if only to make this fan-made trailer come true.

Jason Evans has announced a new flash fiction contest at his blog, Clarity of Night. These contests always bring out great writing and strong and supportive responses from the community. I encourage everyone to check it out and enter.

Stop the presses. Looks like a small but surprisingly significant percentage - more than ten percent - of Caucasians may have a gene that makes them more creative while consuming alcohol. Okay, you can restart those presses.

Now that all the writers have fled to the nearest bar claiming they want to "get some work done," the rest of you can weigh the consequences of drinks ability to prime the pump:

The creative effect of alcohol, then, seems to involve a delicate counterpoint between stimulation and relaxation. Unlike some side-effects of drink, such as its tendency to make some people morose or violent, this endorphin release is positive and pleasant to behold. People with this gene variant also seem more prone to alcoholism, perhaps engaging in an increasingly vain pursuit of the highs they used to experience after the first drink or two.

Yeah, so, not all good. Good feelings (plus), more likely to be alcoholic (negative), vain pursuit of the high (been there, done that).

"It's a game of Whac-a-Mole," said Russell Davis, an author and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a trade association that helps authors pursue digital pirates. "You knock one down and five more spring up."

I think the key issue to literary piracy is the availability and ease of purchasing e-books. Some people don't pirate music simply because it has become so easy to buy music legitimatly. So many people are uninformed on how to find pirated material (the less tech savvy) that reaching out and saying "Hey, 99-cent music purchases" was all it took to get them. Instead of chasing after the minority of readers who are pirates, why not reach out the majority of readers who aren't and who are, for whatever reason, not buying as many books.

As the article says:

"If iTunes started three years earlier, I'm not sure how big Napster and the subsequent piratical environments would have been, because people would have been in the habit of legitimately purchasing at pricing that wasn't considered pernicious," said Richard Sarnoff, a chairman of Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer titles.

Some form of subscription service, with ease of use and limited hoops to jump through might just make sales go up even if piracy doesn't go down.

Trent Reznor, front man and founder of Nine Inch Nails, talks about the changes to the business model of music publishing in a recent interview done by Digg.com. He is an artist worth listening to, and a visionary in both his artistic work and his business acumen. While the interview is targeted specifically at changes to the music industry, his vision of how artists can advocate for themselves is applicable across the spectrum to artists of all media, including publishing. The entire interview is worth checking out, if for no other reason than to see Trent explain why he has Bell Biv Devoe's "Poison" on his iPod, but the video below is focused on the first question, about the changes to the industry, and where he thinks things might be headed.