Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
I don't see what the fuss is about. Writers lose more money from people buying second hand books than they ever will through piracy. I don't think I've ever seen anyone have a fit about that and demand that all the second hand book shops be burnt down and all the second hand book buyers be locked away in jail.
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Not really: Those books were bought once, and the author made their money from that sale. That book may be sold again through used markets, but only (in most cases) a few times before the book finds its permanent home, or is trashed.
An ebook can potentially be reproduced and shared with thousands of your closest friends, with no money going to the author beyond the first file. Authors stand to lose orders of magnitude more on e-book sharing compared to used book buying.
This hints at one of the matters that would make sharing more palatable to authors/creators: Establishing a way for them to make some money off of each new iteration of their book, no matter who duplicated it or who got it. If, as has been suggested in
another thread, we have the technology to solve many of the problems of the new market of ebooks, we should be able to solve this.