ebook piracy post rec

[cimorene]

mirabella is so, so right about ebook piracy.

Now, you could make the point that every one of those thousand paperbacks has (presumably) already been bought once, and therefore represents a positive cash flow to the author at some point in the past; while the pirated e-books, by definition, are a commodity that has not resulted in cash flow, ever. This is, strictly speaking, true. But going from Point A - people are getting something for free that they really shouldn't be - to Point B - and therefore the author is being directly harmed by lost sales due to piracy - is like me saying the reason I'm not rich today is that everyone on Earth didn't send me twenty bucks for my birthday every year like my grandmother did. Worse, it's like me making a budget where I spend like every person on Earth is a potential source of twenty bucks every January 24th and then being surprised and pissed off when I come up short.

Comments

[sunsetmog.livejournal.com]

Issue of e-book piracy aside, 90% of my book collection is second hand. I can't afford to do anything else and I wouldn't want to - I read too much and love second hand books - but I am tired of being made to feel bad about it by authors going on and on on twitter or their blogs about anyone who doesn't buy their books new being the spawn of satan.

I really appreciate you linking to this post - it's articulated a lot of what I've been feeling recently, and getting my new kindle has just made all of this suddenly rather relevant.

[cimorene]

Woooooord. Used books are the primary material of my parents' enormous personal library and probably have made up 80% of the presents I've received in my life. Basically, we've ALWAYS gone by that "buy it only when you know that you like it" philosophy for books that so many people have only slowly come around to for music. That's a luxury, of course, that's only available to people who are able to get hold of books to read without paying for them first - principally by borrowing them from friends for my parents and me (it's a good way to get recs too, so it's not like borrowing is a hardship), but occasionally through used books if they look good and are really, really cheap. The books they (and I) buy new are restricted to ones we already loved but didn't already own, or, more likely, new releases from authors we discovered through borrowing/used books in the first place. And this is the case for... well... most of the people my parents borrow and lend books with, too, so that's most of their circle of acquaintance?

I don't really see anything wrong with the economic model where the only people the writers make money off of are the ones who become their fans, and want their books badly enough to buy them brand new - and can afford them because, of course, if you can't, you can still borrow them as soon as a friend has finished reading their copy, as several of our friends do with us!

Haha, sorry for the babble. The industry is just so phenomenally stupid about this, and it's really annoying when it seems to be catching to authors.

(That's another consideration - any author my parents have discovered to be an asshole, or politically objectionable, but whose work they still like, immediately goes on a borrow-or-used-only list to make sure they don't get any money from them. My dad has quite the collection of Orson Scott Card given to him by other people after they read them. XD)