9/ I've seen people make up bullshit scenarios like "what if I dip and browse? Doesn't author deserve full price?"
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10/ No s/he does not. Corner cases make for bad rules. If somebody reads 10% chances are overwhelmingly that they didn't want to read more
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11/ It's the same unbundling logic that killed the practice of bundling bad songs with hits and charging more. Just technically more complex
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12/ Yes you can game this in various ways, but overall it's good. More information, lower prices, more readers, bigger market
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13/ But why not try something utterly radical: if you want to write a 100,000 word tome, try to *retain the reader's attention* all the way
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what I'm concerned about is the incentives it could create for "cliff hanger" chapters, like "hooold on some more awesome stuff coming"
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Always been true. We're just blind to old incentives of books, alive to new "clickbait" incentives of blogs. This is just new.
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how did it use to be true? What incentive did the author use to have to make his book as long and the info as distributed as possible?
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Not that particular failing. Old incentives encouraged authors to pander to gatekeepers like critics by writing to certain tastes.
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sure, but it's a different issue that I'm talking about here. Essentially this could bring click bait to books
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