Originally Posted by Xanthe
My impression of the majority of people who provide ebooks to the various P2P site is not that they are counting coup for the number of books they provide. That type of mentality seems to be more confined to the movie and games genre, where the age range and gender is more specific  . A good portion of the music down-loaders have the "stick it to the RIAA" mentality as a result of the court cases that have been ongoing since the original Napster went down. Right or wrong, that mentality is entrenched.
But the ebook and audiobook sharers, with them it seems to be more of a sense of participating in a giant, worldwide free public library, from what I've seen. (And remember, the majority of us are used to reading books for free, and we tend to create our own lending libraries among friends and family.) They tend to thank each other for posts. They recommend similar authors. They act as reference librarians for one another and do searches for requested books. It's just a different mentality, and it hasn't been one of "let's rip off the writers and the publishing houses because we can". It's more of "oh, an author I never heard of before - that book looks good - thanks!" and "I'm glad I finally found an ebook version because my paper copy is falling apart from all the times I've re-read it".
What I mean is that the ebook/audiobook down-loaders are not the hard-core pirates that everyone seems so afraid of. Most of them are buying just as many paper books as they have in the past. They are people who just love books and who finally can share what they love with others. And a lot of them are fine-tuning the ebooks they put up with more care than the publishing houses do. I know the people who only see this issue in terms of black-and-white are going to dismiss this observation, but I'm telling you, there's a sense of community in those places, the same as there is here.
What I can see happening though, is as ereaders become more commonplace, more people are going to look for content for them. With the publishing houses trying to create a monopoly on pricing, they are traveling down the same path of the RIAA in that they are concerned with short-term profit instead of a long-range selling strategy. They are out-of-tune with their changing consumer base and if they don't wake up and realize that they are on the cusp of change, all of those easy-going people on the ebook sharing sites are going to develop that same "stick it to The Man" mentality that the music sharers have and refuse to pay high prices for ebooks. |