Writer Ewan Morrison has come to the realization, as he explains in this short piece, that the book industry is inevitably going to end up being napsterized. Well... duh! Do publishers really think they're going to be able to keep their e-books wired shut in kindles and nooks for very long? Pdfs of copyrighted books are already proliferating on file-sharing websites, and .pdfs can be read very conveniently on iPads.
Since authors are increasingly unable to earn a living from writing alone, they're probably going to end up taking teaching jobs, like Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton. In the last decade or so, lots of critics and journalists have been doing that, such as James Wood, who used to be at the Guardian and New Republic and is now a "professor of practice" (i.e. adjunct) at Harvard while occasionally writing short pieces for the New Yorker.
Writers in the United States have been hit with a double whammy in recent years: not only is there a bleak outlook for the magazine and newspaper industry in the internet age, but the skyrocketing cost of health care has made freelance careers increasingly unfeasible in general.
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