Quote:
Originally Posted by MattW
Hm. So, basically, you're saying "Screw the author because Amazon dashed my hopes for a bargain. The writer did nothing wrong, even so I'll steal their work from them and if they don't like it, they can suck it." Personally, I find this a very weak straw-man argument.
|
I'm not sure 'straw-man' applies.. If anything, you might consider it a red herring.
The question is how to justify differential pricing.
Now, if the publisher were an ethical one (e.g.
AKPress) I would consider a true differential pricing model justifiable. However,
in case of
Amazon, I really don't trust that they have both the customer's and their employees' best interests at heart.
More generally, and I would suggest ignoring the whole issue of georestrictions and nation-states for now, what I would find acceptable is a system where people from some areas were to pay more than people from others. The issue with the model as employed by Amazon, as well as by a lot of companies, is one where the differential pricing only happens by country, rather than by income quintile (or whatever). In the US, you'd never see Amazon charging one price to people who live in Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons, and another to people living in Detroit or Appalachia. This makes differential pricing based on nation-state seem particularly unfair, both because the richest people in the US are far richer than the richest people in Norway, and because the median income in the US is much lower than in Norway.
The other issue is what to do with the intuition that 'if you've heard of a <book>, and you are unable to read it because of either Customs or georestriction issues, you are now justified to want to read the <book>. On the one hand, this seems wrong, because of how we are taught to think about product access -- in terms of "sales"/"consumption". On the other -- looked at from the social perspective of being told that someone has a story they would like to tell you -- the intuition that you should be allowed to hear that story seems quite logical. A further problem is created by the suggestion that your 'purchase' somehow matters to the author, as well as to the whole system of creating cultural works. The question is whether your right to share in the story (or piece of music, or whatever) is stronger than the duty to support the author (or the author+system) that supposedly forms a necessary condition for sharing in the cultural expression.
I do not know the answer to that question, but it seems to me that it should be possible to structure this system differently in ways that still 'promote the arts', but that make it easier for people to share their thoughts with one another; this would quite likely lead to a diminution, as well as changes to the whole publishing ecosystem, but that's inevitable, given its function as part conduit, part gatekeeper, etc.. But organizational form is not sacred, and I don't see any particular reason why this particular system deserves the status it has today.