Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
I have never, once, ever, seen anyone propose splitting their contribution between the author and the publisher. By rights, any such contribution should be split equally, because the publisher contributes about as many man-hours to the average book as the author does. According to at least one professional author, Charlie Stross.
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If it's a paper book, shouldn't we pay the bookstore that sold it, too? After all, they contributed to getting that book to the reader.
And then there's the truck driver who delivered it from the distributor to the bookstore, and the one who took it from the publisher to the distributor. Why are we leaving them out?
Then there are all the employees of the distributor, without whom the book would never have made it from the publisher to the bookstore to the shelf you borrowed it from. We need to pay them, too, every time a different set of eyeballs looks at that book.
If you borrowed the book from your brother, who bought it at a yard sale, where the seller got it from a used bookstore, who took it in trade from an elderly professor, who had it left behind in his office by a graduating student, who got it from a put-and-take shelf, where it came from a guy in the next dorm, whose mother bought it for his birthday (and read it first) ... how many of
those people do you need to pay?
And if you got a bookshelf that went through a similar set of hands ... borrowed from your brother, bought at a yard sale, sold by a used furniture store, etc., etc. ... shouldn't you do exactly the same thing for that bookshelf?
Isn't this getting a little ridiculous?