Wealth & Money Quote by Rudy Rucker

Rucker’s line lands like a cold shower on the utopian story we still like to tell about the internet: that digitization “democratized” publishing and liberated writers from gatekeepers. Instead, he frames electronic distribution as a polite euphemism for exile. If print is the front of the store, e-books are the bargain bin in the back, where books go when someone in the chain decides they’re not worth the paper. The phrasing “deemed profitable enough to print” is doing the real work here. It’s not about artistic merit; it’s about an algorithm of risk, inventory, and marketing budgets. A book becomes a spreadsheet cell.

The second sentence sharpens the knife. “You hardly make any money” punctures the myth that lower costs automatically mean higher author earnings. Rucker’s scientist pragmatism shows: he’s talking about incentives and systems, not vibes. Digital may remove printing and warehousing, but it also invites discount culture, platform dominance, and royalty structures that treat writers as content suppliers. The result is a market where the marginal cost of distribution approaches zero, and so does the perceived value.

Context matters: Rucker is a science-fiction figure who lived through multiple waves of “the future is here” techno-enthusiasm. His skepticism reads less like nostalgia for paper and more like a warning about how new mediums often reproduce old hierarchies. E-books don’t automatically disrupt power; they can simply make rejection faster, cheaper, and easier to scale.