Because of these several impediments, as well as other technical difficulties, you will find typos and occasional replication of text. In our humble opinion, typos show that the logs are of *live* chats, not canned interviews, and minimal editing of these logs has taken place.

[Cybling] Welcome Mr. Silverberg.
[Silverberg] Hello
[Cybling] Good to meet you here at the convention.
[Cybling] Your bio was quite brief ths year, 8^D
[Kimmo] Hello!
[Silverberg] Hello
[Silverberg] Didn't I say that already?
[Cybling] "Robert Silverberg has written a lot of stuff. "
[Silverberg] He sure has.
[Cybling] lol...you most certainly have!
[Kimmo] Be fair, Cybling, what else does it have to say?
[Cybling] How many years have you been working in the fantastic genres?
[Cybling] If I may ask.
* Kimmo grins.
[Silverberg] Sold my first story in 1953.
[Cybling] If you have questions for our guest, please just ask. But please, let the guest answer one question before you ask another.
[Silverberg] No laptop computers then, either.
[Cybling] No, not even electric typwriters and I'm sure...
[Cybling] you were working with carbon paper.
[Silverberg] We wrote the stuff on clay tablets and baked them before we submitted them to the editors.
[Cybling] Who did you make your first sale to?
[Cybling] lol
[Silverberg] A Scottish magazine called NEBULA.
[Kimmo] I wonder if modern editors wouldn't enjoy seeing writers approach, kneeling and with hand-incised clay tablets?
[Silverberg] Hard to get them into the computers.
[Cybling] I'm assuming that you were living in Scotland at the time?
[Silverberg] Brooklyn, actually.
[Cybling] Sorry...I thought I'd missed an accent.
[Silverberg] Brookloscots.
[Cybling] i'm sorry, I know that dedicated fans and authors particularly during that time...
[Cybling] had a tendency to subscribe to as many magazines as possible.
[Kimmo] So with that long a view of the writing/publishing industry, might I ask what your opinion is of the e-book issue? Will it work?
[Cybling] There were quite a few more pulps in the 50s than now.
[Silverberg] Kimmo: I think e-book is perhaps a couple of years away from really arriving but it's definitely the way things will go.
[Cybling] yacc welcome
[yacc] Thanks.
[Cybling] Folks...come on..
[Silverberg] Hit them keys, guys.
[Kimmo] We talked a little about it in here last night, and not all believed that e-books would change the industry much.
[Silverberg] Wrong wrong wrong. The whole apparatus of printing, binding, distributing, will fade away like amoebas in the Phoenix sunlight.
[Cybling] Mr. Silverberg...so far you've done an autographing yesterday and have a "conversation" tomorrow.
[Cybling] I'm surprised that they don't have every second of your time...
[Cybling] booked here at the convention.
[Kimmo] Well, Microsoft has gotten into the e-book thing now... here comes the juggernaut :)
[Silverberg] I try to save a little time for quiet consumption of beer with old friends in inconspicuous corners.
[Cybling] And I'm sure you have quite a few friends here at the convention.
[Cybling] One of the major complaints I've heard today is too many people and not enough time to say hi.
[Kimmo] Mr. Silverberg, which would you believe would work better, having big "portals" that would replace the current publishing houses, or will everyone be his own publisher?
[Silverberg] I try to carve out a little miniconvention for myself within the vast main event. As for the Kimmo question, I think there'll be
[Silverberg] publishing houses on the Internet -- like Fictionwise or Peanut right now -- that will replace the existing ones in the print world. Self-publishing won't fly.
[Cybling] Thanks! Interesting. ARe you involved in any online publishing right now? Magazine? Books?
[Kimmo] Yeah, I guess there needs to be editors still, to sort the dreck from the good stuff
[Silverberg] You have it, Kimmo. When everybody is his own publisher, no one will know what to expect from any downlou
[Silverberg] download. As for me, I'm busy these days putting my vast back list out on various e-sites.
[Cybling] Excellent. Where can we look for your work specifically?
[Silverberg] Peanut. Alexandria. Fictionwise. So far;others in negotiating stage.
[Cybling] This is great. I know I'm looking forward to getting work of yours...
[Cybling] that isn't available elsewhere.
[Cybling] folks...if you have questions for Mr. Silverberg, now's the time.
[Kimmo] Personally I think perhaps the e-publishers go a bit overboard with the prices per book. Maybe that's just me?
[Cybling] you have another panel tomorrow...one other...titled When Both Spouses Write...
[Cybling] Can you tell us a little about that?
[Silverberg] Prices? You mean you PAY for the stuff?
* Kimmo grins
[Cybling] LOL.
[Cybling] Didn't they tell you that Mr. Silverberg?
[Kimmo] Uh-oh, I let the cat out of the bag. Guess Peanut & co will have an irate phone call demanding royalties soon ;)
[Silverberg] We are innocent sheep.
[Cybling] LOL. Now I'd heard that most epublishers...
[Cybling] were paying higher royalties than pulp publishers today...
[Cybling] if only in that they're paying royalties.
[Kimmo] I think Baen pays their authors double royalties on the webscription books at least
[Silverberg] Absolutely. Since they don't have paper or ink or distribution to pay for, they can offer vastly higher royalty rates andstill clean up.
[Cybling] then e-publishing is indeed the wave of the future since it should lure more writers out as paper prices rise.
[Kimmo] Yeah, which brings me back to my point... $12 for an electronic book is just too much. Especially a book that already exists in electronic or scannable form, ready to go to the e-presses
[Silverberg] Got me. Publisher needs to pay for all those costly electrons. Deserves some cash return.
[Cybling] yes they do. And let's not forget that bigger cut the authors and artists get.
[Kimmo] Yeah, that's the one big bright spot.
[Cybling] Mr. Silverberg...back to tomorrow's panel on Writing Spouses. Your spouse writes and it makes for an interesting household?
[Silverberg] We keep separate offices and try to stay out of each other's way. The real interactions come laterin the day, when the day's work gets brought into view for discussion.
[Cybling] I'm fairly sure that the advice given at that panel will be of help to many of the new telecommuting ...
[Cybling] and home office workers.
[Silverberg] I didn't marry a science fiction writer. She caught it afterwards.
[Cybling] Did SF of the 50s forsee this change in the way we go to work?
[Silverberg] No. The Internet came out of theblue, no s-f forecast involved.
[Cybling] Ah...so you see SF as infectious. We were talking about Filking being a dread convention disease just Thursday.
[Silverberg] There's a vaccine now.
[Cybling] LOLOL.
[Cybling] That's very good to know.
[Kimmo] Yeah, carpal tunnel syndrome. Hurts too much to type :P
[Cybling] Causes one not to buy tapes in the dealer's room.
[Cybling] Mr. Silverberg do you have a new book in the publishing pipeline...
[Cybling] or something we can get our hands on right now.
[Silverberg] The final Majipoor book, KING OF DREAMS, is due next spring.
[Silverberg] The one before that, LORD PRESTIMION, is just out in paperback.
[Cybling] and who's the publisher for KING OF DREAMS and LORD PRESTIMION?
[Silverberg] Eos.
[Kimmo] How much do you normally write in, say, a given year?
[Cybling] Thanks.
[Silverberg] One book a year, tops. Maybe a story or two. Was much more when I was younger.
[Cybling] Have you been steering clear of short fiction, or can we be looking for a short story or a novella in the near future?
[Silverberg] Nothing in the pipeline. Short stories are hard work and I've been loafing this summer.
[Cybling] Summer is a good season to loaf.
[Silverberg] So is wintr. Also spring,fall.
[Cybling] Folks...we've had Mr. Silverberg at our disposal for a half an hour now....
[Cybling] unless you have a question for him, I'm going to let him get back to his mini-convention and friends.
[Silverberg] Speak now or forever hold your cursors.
[Cybling] LOL.
[zardoz] thanks..for typing on your day off!
[Kimmo] Guess I've harped on enough about e-publishing, comes from being into computers :)
[Kimmo] Thanks for letting us bug you a while!
[Silverberg] A person of deep sensitivity, Zardoz!
[Cybling] Okay...folks. Thanks Mr. Silverberg for taking time out to join us online.
* Cybling applauds
[Silverberg] Thanks. Good thing none of you asked The Real Question. Missed your chance forever,
[Silverberg] but that's okay. So long.