Paid Content, 2048

[coalescent]

A speculation on the future of publishing. The quotes in the piece (or most of them, anyway) are real, but the rest is fiction:

REUTERS - Bangalore, Monday January 8, 2048

Author, critic, and collective publishing pioneer Douglas Rushkoff died in his home Saturday afternoon, a family spokesman said. No cause was given. He was 86.

[...]

Rushkoff, who first surpassed Isaac Asimov as the most prolific author of all time, with 324 books and approximately 2 trillion words posted, may be best remembered for his creation of the "omniscient author," an anonymous writers' collective continuously publishing works under a single name—his—after Rushkoff acheived some reknown as a media critic and novelist in the late 1990s.

[...]

Rushkoff (or to be precise, the Corporation) overtook Asimov as history's most prolific author in 2034, but was himself overtaken a few years ago by the Cory Doctorow Collective. Doctorow, the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and more than 400 other novels, personally retired from writing science fiction in 2016, but his subsequent decision to register his body of work as open source—to allow anyone to alter, annotate, revise, and republish his books in any medium—was immediately hailed as a breakthrough by the vestiges of the book publishing industry. Today, the "Complete Works of Cory Doctorow" (updated hourly) is available from Amazon.com in a 6 terabyte download, while an estimated 200 smaller versions of his collected works, in varying combinations, are available as free and paid downloads across the Web.

[via The Infinite Matrix]