|
Authors have little if any input over what kind of conditions major publishers slap on the sales of their books. This is particularly true of the cabal publishers, who give the author an advance on royalties and don't want to hear from him until he has another book to sell. Unless they want to go indie (which, if you have an offer in hand from a big publisher, would be leaving money on the table) they don't have a choice. So buyers aren't making any agreement with the author; the author isn't even in the loop.
Buyers aren't making any agreement with the publisher, either. At best, there's clickwrap conditions: "you use this, and you have thereby agreed to whatever terms we want to load on it." The cabal publishers want to give people less than they do with an ebook but charge them more -- for the "convenience", according to some of their astroturfers. If they'd followed that logic when MM paperbacks came out, we'd pay twice as much for a MM paperback as we do for a hardcover, because it takes half (or less) of the space.
It's not a matter of only keeping your word when you feel like it, and anybody who wants an honest discussion, rather than to keep repeatedly presenting one side without listening to the others would know that. It's a matter of not giving your word in the first place. Incidentally, have you ever wondered why these "agreements" (to which you do not actually agree) aren't written in English? At least, not in any English that normal people can read? Have you wondered why the important parts are written in capital letters, which are known to be much harder to read than mixed case? It's not that they couldn't make them readable, or at least provide a summary; it's that they don't WANT you to read them. They want you to feel like you own the book (hence the "BUY" button, the constant references to it being for sale, and so on) so that you'll pay them in the first place, but they don't want you to know the actual terms you're renting it under, which would discourage people from letting that thing anywhere near their computers. They want the best of both worlds. This is not the behavior of an ethical party to any sort of agreement. You wouldn't pay for a car from someone on Craigslist who is clear about the money but mumbles about everything else; why buy a book that way?
As for DRM, something to think about: As things stand, a few hundred years from now even today's copyrighted books will finally become public domain (though I expect "perpetual copyright", accruing of course to the large corporations because the authors, everyone who knew them, and the grandchildren of everyone who knew them, are long dead, to become the law sooner or later). If those books have only been published in electronic format, and it's illegal to remove the DRM, what happens to the books? It's not possible to scan a paper book; there never was one. And it's not legal to remove the DRM, regardless of the status of the underlying work, just like the ebook stores today take public domain works and slap their own DRM on them. So what happens to that book? Even though the book is public domain, there is no way the public can actually make use of it.
I don't break my word. Ever.
But I also don't give it just because someone else says I did.
(and I don't buy DRM-restricted ebooks, but that's another story entirely)
|