Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
And we're back to the circular argument. If I buy it used and scan it, neither the author or the publisher receives any money from the sale. If I save a step and pull it down off the darknet, neither the author or the publisher receives any money. Other than your ethics, there is no difference in the end.
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Except that if you buy a book secondhand, the author got paid for it when it was originally sold.
It doesn't matter that the author doesn't get paid
directly when you buy a book secondhand. You pay the author
indirectly with a secondhand book purchase, and in doing so - rather than pirating the book - you are respecting the author's copyright and supporting the author's right to publish the book.
Part of the value of every paperback I buy new is the fact that I can sell it on. When I buy a book new and pay the author, that's part of the consideration I make - that I can take it to my local secondhand bookstore or put it on Amazon resellers and get 50¢ back per $1 I paid for it. If the author of a book said to you, "here's my book, and here's a copy of my book which you can't sell secondhand, which do you want?" you'd expect to pay less for the copy that you can't resell. So the consideration of being able to resell effectively raises the value of a new book. Whilst not everyone may resell their old books, or may consciously think about this aspect of the transaction, no economist would argue that it's not part of the deal. It does affect the value of books in the marketplace.
Secondand, if you pay $100 or $500 or $1000 for a rare out-of-print pulp paperback, then the author or the publisher will soon start reprinting it. If everyone who said "it's wrong, it's theft, to pirate a $10 bestseller" applied the same ethics to out-of-print books, then the secondhand prices of out-of-print books would rise.
If we take the
Deathlands series of novels for instance - many of those are now out of print, some are (I believe) now becoming quite hard to find. If we just download the books that are no longer in print then we give Gold Eagle Publishing no reason to reprint them; if we hunt them down assiduously, accept that we must pay the market value for the secondhand copy as its price gets bid up on eBay... when Gold Eagle Publishing sees the prices rise on eBay then it will think "golly, we'll be able to make a few quid by reprinting this".
There aren't many of us here who would say it's unreasonable to format-shift books you own. Buy the paperback, then download a digital copy from the darknet to read on your Nook. Few of us has a problem with that, I certainly don't, and for those that do it's a different argument that the one I'm making.
If you take the "piracy is theft" attitude to the file-sharing of books that are widely available in bookstores, then it is complete hypocrisy to make an exception for yourself for out-of-print titles. (I'm not speaking directly to jgaiser here, just in general). You have absolutely no right to judge someone else for "stealing" one book and to make an exception for yourself just because you can't be arsed to track down a hard-to-find secondhand copy, or you're too damn tight to pay the market price, same as the other collectors.
Either you support copyright in its current form (I don't) and you obey it in all its rules and intricacies, or you try to have it overturned. But don't support copyright, call other people "thieves", talk about the law and supporting authors... and then make up exceptions to suit yourself.
Stroller.