Quote:
Originally Posted by AndroidGold
at the end of the day, writers are not going to get book deals from publishers if publishers can't make money off the books they sell.
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Ignoring the idea that much of what publishers do is of limited utility and the rest can be replaced, I've always wondered why I should care about these suddenly impoverished writers any more than I should care about steel workers or accountants or anyone else out of work? It's not like I would greatly suffer if every writer alive stopped producing. There's enough stuff already existing that I could read a dozen works a day for the next century and not run out of material, even restricting myself to genres I like. (I am mostly talking fiction writers here, I confess. If scientific papers and news reports vanished, I could see problems even in my selfishness.) Yes, there are some series I follow that I would see more entries in, but that happens anyway, when a writer dies or a series is simply dropped from lack of interest. So even if I bought the notion that copyright infringement could bring the whole publishing world to its knees, and every fiction writer alive stopped creating news works (and by extension, that no new system could arise, and no new writers start producing), I still can't see a real reason to care.