Cooper wrote, “I believe free electronic copies can significantly increase mindshare and print sales. With a book like Beginning Ruby, the majority of readers want a print book, so it seemed a no-brainer to keep sales strong in a market with growing competition.”

However, that’s where he ran into a problem: his publisher didn’t want to make the ebook free.

So Cooper suggested (or for legal reasons, at least sort of put forth the idea with a wink) that people pass his book around different Pirate-type sites and RapidShare. His publisher might sue, he warned, but he won’t. Which seems like a pretty swell thing to do.

Whether this changes how you feel about giving stuff away is completely up to you, of course. Maybe there’s an anti-Cooper out there who can prove he lost money due to piracy and is none too pleased about it. This is just something writers should take under consideration.

Emma Barnett reported that Sorrell, who is the WPP’s chief executive, said at a conference today, “Murdoch is absolutely correct to try and get people paying for content – it is critical for traditional media businesses as there is not enough advertising to support these models anymore. Getting consumers to pay for content they value is key. We have to find those areas.”

Now, as before, how much you cheer on that statement may vary depending on which side of the new media/old media split you find yourself.

Also, regardless of how supportive you feel, there’s the question of whether Sorrell can indeed “find those areas,” because all sorts of people, from bloggers to veteran newspaper reporters, seem to believe that print is dying.

However, given that Sorrell and Murdoch are both very rich and powerful men, they’ll have the ability to dictate how a good many writers will operate for at least a few years to come. So for better or for worse, expect to see some paywall experiments occur before long.

Here’s the deal: a “real-time, user-reported news service” is one of the sixteen remaining ideas in Google’s Project 10^100 save-the-world endeavor. Google will put up as much as $10 million to support five of the ideas, and people are allowed to vote on what they think is most deserving of the funding.

The news service is supposed to “[h]elp people find and report timely, important local information. Users have submitted many ideas proposing better access to locally relevant info, including real-time news (fires, natural disasters and road accidents), disease tracking (mobile devices that track people’s health status) and personal incidents (calling to report a threatening criminal situation, natural disaster or medical emergency).”

This idea could make it a lot easier for previously unnoticed writers to get their names out there. At the same time, it could put some of the current crop of reporters out of jobs.

You can read more about Project 10^100 here and vote here if any of this sounds interesting. Voting ends October 8th.

Let’s face it, after all: the average person probably doesn’t know that Google Book Search exists. Google doesn’t make it visible along with the main “Images,” “Videos,” and “Maps” tabs, tucking it away under “more” instead.

So it’s important that now, after someone searches for a term or phrase from Google.com, they can click on the little “+ Show options” button and see the word “Books” displayed as the second-from-the-top choice.

A post on the Inside Google Books blog explained to users, “This will provide easier access to books and magazines by letting you slice and dice your results with certain characteristics. For example, you can now search for only books or magazines or for only content that you can preview in Google Books.”

This is almost sure to lead to greater exposure for some writers, and that’s a very good thing.

A lot of data has come to light in just the past day or so indicating that ebooks still aren’t close to mainstream. Let’s start with a Slashdot poll. Slashdot readers are geeks, right? They love tech and buy stuff before everybody else. But 25 percent of a poll’s 10,731 respondents have said ebooks “will never lure me away from my paper books!” Also, a full 51 percent said they’re “not yet compelling enough to buy.”

So there’s one ebook failure. For the rest, let’s turn to Lance Whitney.

Earlier today, he wrote, “Among 1,529 consumers who responded to a July 2009 questionnaire from research firm In-Stat, only 5.8 percent currently own an e-book reader. And only 11 percent of those questioned said they planned to buy one in the next 12 months . . .”

Whitney provided stats from Forrester Research, as well. Forrester found that, even if the prices of ebook readers fell to $98 or less, not even 40 percent of its survey’s participants would commit to buying one in the next six months.

Even if you have to print everything off your personal computer or scrawl it out by hand, then, try not to stake your entire career on attracting readers with just ebooks.

As explained by a post on the Inside Google Books blog, “Creative Commons licenses make it easier for authors and publishers to tell readers whether and how they can use copyrighted books. You can grant your readers the right to share the work or to modify and remix it. You can decide whether commercial use is okay. There’s even an option to dedicate your book to the public domain.”

The post then continues, “We’ve marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on.”

And considering that Google Books is, well, Google Books, making your works available through it does indeed seem likely to lead to some sharing.

The downside, of course, is the lack of income that’ll accompany this move, but you could always try to use just one or two books as a hook to grow a fan base.

Imagine this: you walk into a bookstore, buy the digital Google edition of a novel, and then are able to access the work from your cell phone, laptop, or home PC. Or maybe even someone else’s home PC, if you’re traveling and have some sort of way of proving your purchase history.

Neat, right? Clancy figures this is just as good as having a physical copy, so long as a big company’s backing the effort. According to E.B. Boyd, he reasoned, “For most people, your library is something that you don’t pull books off all that often, but when you need it, you want it to be there. That’s where a cloud really works. You’re not going to actively manage it, but you want to make sure that five years from now, [it's there].”

Clancy later continued, “So part of our model is to figure out we’re going to syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in bricks and mortar stores . . .” Or online, of course.

Clancy didn’t give many clues about how far along this idea is. Still, given that Google’s got a market cap of $140 billion, it seems rather likely that the search giant will be able to make it become a reality.

This BBC article says “the writing is on the wall” for writing by hand, and in a couple of generations, our descendants will be looking at our hand-penned notes they we look at documents from the 18th century, when esses looked like effs.

As the digital age progresses and keyboards invade every aspect of our social and professional lives, who needs or wants to have to decipher somebody else’s poor scribbling?

Chickenscratch, we used to call it back home. That’s why we were hammered into proper letters. But really, how often do you write something by hand anymore? We make notes in the margin (and others can never read them), we make grocery lists, etc. Our kids will do the same, likely in some digital form. When they do write it’ll be printing letters, probably. Cursive was supposed to be faster and prettier, but what use is it now?

Well, unlike printed material—which will not go away mind you, just evolve—it’s not a big loss to lose script or to have relegated to a an art form like ancient calligraphy.

If you’re a writer by occupation, though, you know that sometimes things come out differently when you have to write them by hand. I imagine for us in one of the world’s oldest professions, will reserve script—for those of us who’ve actually learned or been taught—for these brief exercises of the past.

Some personal favourites are Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, The Dubliners by James Joyce, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, The Worst Case Scenario Handbook, The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

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1. Curiosity

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5. Birds on a Wire

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18. Level 10