@cstross @Mediagazer also, in France, Harlequin has been using software to “pre-write” most of their romance stuff for more than 2 decades, so AI is just the next step, really.

@cstross

1984 keeps recurring. I seem to remember that the Party churns out automatically-produced romance and porn novels for the proles.

@cstross

Safari Books Online has a pretty opaque model. They tried the 'pay per page read' thing for a while, but it was hard to make work without DRM that was so invasive everyone opted out. Now they pay a flat monthly rate where the rate is set by whichever popularity bucket you're in (it was where a lot of the money I got from my books came from, because I got 50% of the Safari income, much less for the print editions).

I can kind-of see the benefit of per-page or per-chapter things for textbooks because I often want to dip into a textbook to answer a specific question. And it's nice if I can have access to a library of thousands of books, but still reward the author of the one I read two pages from to answer my question.

But for fiction, it makes no sense. A 300-page book of prose where 300 people read one page and give up is clearly less valuable than one where one person reads the whole book. I'd want a logarithmic scale for fiction.

@cstross "failing to disclose" sounds like there is no intent behind it.

@cstross How do you see it play for writers? Finding something worth reading was already difficult (unless you go with classics) but now how do one gets enough following for people to actually find their work?