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By David Rothman

image Richard Herley, a prize-winning U.K. writer of such lively books as The Penal Colony, hoped that the shareware model would work for his novels. It didn’t, at least not as he saw it.

Now he’s taken RichardHerley.com down and disabled the related e-mail address since he doesn’t consider the hassles to be worth it.

You can still find his works at Manybooks.net and Feedbooks. But don’t expect Richard to be offering his novels this way in the future, assuming he writes any more. Yes, he’s fed up with the mainstream publishing models, too. And, no, as a reader of The Penal Colony, I can attest that he’s no money-grubbin’ hack; and others apparently agree about the quality of his work. He simply has the bizarre belief that writers owe it to themselves and their families to be paid. While Richard made his books initially free, he expected to be paid if you liked them

The limits of "free"

I continue to be a big booster of free books. But, please, let’s have a library model, among others, to help provide fair compensation for creative people. Wowio-style ad models? Fine. but they’re hardly a full solution, just as the library model isn’t. We need a mix of models, including of course the bookstore one.

The Kindle alternative: Richard said Amazon’s terms just didn’t make sense to him. He’s also not the biggest lover of Amazon’s insistence on DRM.

Also down: The dotReader site has been unreachable for a few days. I don’t know if this is an accident or if other reasons are involved. The same company’s OSoft site remains up. I’m e-mailing OSoft CEO Mark Carey for an answer.

 
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