Steven Poole is one of many to engage in that promotion du jour, giving away a digital copy of a product—in his case, a book called Trigger Happy about the aesthetics of videogames, a topic which would naturally appeal to an online audience. Six months and 31,100 downloads later, he follows up the experiment with a compelling review of the state of media online and what the future may hold for various creators, notably musicians and writers.

His response is noteworthy for encapsulating many of the issues facing creators who wish (or face pressure) to distribute their works online, especially unfettered by Digital Rights Management (DRM) and preferably free. In the giveaway economy, as with the dotcom bubble before it, how exactly does that lead to sustainable income? Not all doom and gloom, Poole notes the promotional upsides in terms of wider distribution and thus ’seeding the market’ for possible hard-copy sales and future endeavors. However, the Paypal tip jar approach as attempted by many donation-supported software projects, Stephen King’s abortive The Plant, and Radiohead’s experiment with In Rainbows bears out the online form of tragedy of the commons where free access to a resource cannibalizes paid support for it. Without adequate volunteered funds as recompense, Poole summarizes the stark options remaining:

“If the breathless advocates of “the free distribution of ideas” are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don’t think any such thing as a “professional writer” ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.”

He goes on to describe the common rejoinder (termed the “Slashdot argument”) that free content can be subsidized by correlative sales, like live shows, T-shirts, and service contracts. While his reaction to this position is somewhat kneejerk (essentially “you try working for free!”) it does underscore the difficult proposition facing anyone who sees the future purely as online free distribution: just how do you offset the production of an album, a book, a videogame if the audience demands that the primary work be free while you try to make up the difference in low attach-rate items like T-shirts and strategy guides? He also outlines the difficulty facing anyone trying to follow in the footsteps of the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails offerings, namely that both earned their fanbase “through the nasty old music-industry business model” while the possibility of an unknown band reaping the same rewards still begs the question on opt-in payment. Plus, how many other bands will garner the same level of press coverage that in turn drives the traffic once the novelty wears off?

Fortunately for Poole, the book is not yet as mercurial as the album which has been transformed almost completely into pure digitality. Unlike the digital song, the digital book still trails its earthbound progenitor due to the benefits of a book’s physicality - here Poole echoes my own suspicions that the Kindle, despite its early sales, still has a ways to go to supplant the paper tome. The parallel in other fields include the music industry’s push towards DualDisc and CD/DVD sets, which marries a standard music disc with a weight of additional content such as videos, documentaries, and surround sound mixes which effectively slow their pirating due to sheer volume of data; and per Reason’s report on ‘pirate capitalism,’ the fashion industry’s innate “induced obsolescence” enabling it to stay ahead of style knockoffs (a logo can be trademarked, but design elements less so) simply by declaring that last season’s fashions are no longer fashionable.

The charge of planned obsolescence has long been leveled at manufacturers, but it probably plays a much greater role today where the rapid evolution of products like the PC and iPod condition us to view even expensive products as having a short lifecycle. Appliance repair has likewise become less common compared to outright replacement as product complexity has increased (compare with the travails of the independent mechanic dealing with cars tuned by custom microprocessors) and new features accumulate so that the cost/benefit considerations of fixing your old TV instead of picking up a new model sway you towards the latter. As lampooned in Palahniuk’s Fight Club (fittingly itself a rejection of commercial consumerism) where a product-recall specialist outlines the cynical process of assessing automobile defects, companies make calculations about how much durability to build into a product—raising its quality comes at the cost of potential repeat sales. Media obsolescence, meanwhile, appears in the form of format transitions - tape to CD, VHS to DVD, and most recently DVD to Blu-Ray (RIP, HD-DVD) - and more pernicious forms of DRM that lock content to specific devices (e.g. Kindle) and the lamentable return of disposable DVDs which one hopes goes the way of the original DIVX.

Still, the ebook eventually eclipsing physical books is not inconceivable, so Poole outlines a few possibilities of how writers will survive in the post-paper world - an iTunes Store for books, perhaps, or less favorably, a return to patronage. Although he takes a dim view of the latter, prescribed as a throwback to writing being subsidized only by the sufferance of a rich benefactor or as a sideline avocation, alternatives have already begun to appear in the more rapidly gestating post-label musical sphere with examples like CASH Music (Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders) which offers sponsorships for artists like Kristin Hersh, and fan-supported efforts like Subconscious Studios’ “From the Vault” series. This idea is also explored in Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” (with The Register offering counterpoint) and in an interview with Gin Blossoms’ Robin Wilson:

“The only places it seems anymore that you really need to sell CDs are: at your shows and through your website. In the past, it always took so much effort and [money] to get a band into record stores across the country. That was one of the main things you needed a record company for—so that you could be in every Tower Records. But, obviously, Tower Records is gone.”

Naturally the Gin Blossoms—like Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and R.E.M.—benefitted from the label system in order to amass their 30,000 MySpace friends which gives them the potential for greater autonomy. But building a sustainable base directly as a band through online distribution is at least a possibility, whereas the path for writers is not yet clear—they lack similar marketplaces, and the ubiquity of free text on the web devalues the very notion of paying for prose.

(For more perspectives on the free future, see also WIRED’s cover story on “Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” which argues that the trend towards free has as much to do with falling costs of production as aforementioned examples of cross-subsidies and the longstanding tradition of the ‘loss leader.’)