Note that I submitted this in part because it relates to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777584 earlier HN thread, and it should serve as a cautionary tale more than anything else for those who think about trying to make real money writing.
I note that it's from 1996, when the bubble was getting hot; are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?
I think that the date of Greenspun's essay is indicative of how little has changed, rather than how much. Most writers didn't make very much money then, and they still don't, which many people don't seem to realize, and they often work like astronauts to achieve relatively modest financial success, which people like the poster in the original HN thread might want to know before getting started in earnest at trying to write for the book market. Take a look at these posts: http://pimpmynovel.blogspot.com/search/label/knowledge%20is%... regarding current advances for most types of fiction.
"are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?"
Depends on what you mean by "panned out" and "screwed"; I can't really tell from the nature of the question. If you mean, "Do I think writers can make enough from the Internet to support themselves?" the answer is yes; if you mean, "Will many of them do so, especially relative to the number who would like to?" the answer is "no." In fact, I even wrote a blog post on the subject of how unlikely it is for people to make money from blogging: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-p... .
Still, I write this a wannabe novelist who is nonetheless going into things with his eyes open, rather than closed. I originally posted a link to this post: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/19/the-very-very-beginning-write... concerning advice for beginning writers who want to learn how to write well. But even if you do write well, you're not likely to be paid well for it, at least by trying to do so doing fun, creative work for the conventional publishing industry.
But to expand on what I meant: I remember that back in the dot-com bubble, the bubble Greenspan wrote that essay in, there was a lot of enthusiasm and hype about how the future would be so much better for authors and artists than the old world of offline publishing - the Web would empower creators, cut out the middlemen, and channel tons of money to them, via the magic of 0-cost publishing, micropayments, and other things like search engines or aggregators. Greenspan's essay seems to buy into that zeitgeist, albeit relatively modestly.
Of course, that vision has largely come failed to come true (spectacularly so in the case of micropayments and agents). I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it's being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved.
"I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it's being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved."
It wasn't, but if I'd been smarter or had greater foreknowledge it would've been!
