Quote:
Originally Posted by chamekke
Mostly, though, I'll just scratch it off my list.
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And there we have the essence of what these people don't get:
There are more books any of us want to read than we have time to read, even if we did nothing with our leisure time
but read. To an author, their book, or their handful of books, are precious because they're a whole lifetime's work. To a reader, they're one of thousands of books clamoring for our attention, and they're competing with every other form of entertainment out there for the limited amount of time we can allot to said entertainment instead of the necessities of life. If I don't buy book A, I can buy books B, C, D, through ZZ, or download any number of PD freebies. If I don't want to read just now I can write instead, I can play any number of video games, watch any number of DVDs off my rack, stop by Redbox for a new release, see what looks good on streaming video, work on my garden, build more bookcases, work on any number of craft-type projects, walk around my neighborhood, take a hike, play fetch with my cat, tinker with my vanity website, work on a computer program, post to my blog, yammer on MobileRead, sit here and watch birds, or quite literally go fly a kite. Plus ten times as many things I didn't list. That's a lot for one lil' ebook to compete with.
So any time an author puts up a barrier to buying their book, that in effect enhances the appeal of all those competing interests. All those things that involve giving money to someone else, or not giving money to anyone at all. I don't necessarily want to buy their book; I want to do something with X block of time. And if their book has any degree of inconvenience involved, or if I know less about it than I do about any of its competitors, it's going to get pushed off with all the millions of books I don't want, don't know about, or don't have time for. There are plenty of people who are eager to give me reasons to give them money, and plenty of things that involve no money at all, so I don't have the time for one of the exceptions.