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Originally Posted by moz
Steve,
I'd like to move to some extent into the philosophical question more than the practical one. Rather than argue about whether we're obliged to feed lawyers, why not work out what we want, then how we can get it? I assume you'd like to be paid for your writing? And I'd like to pay you for it. So, generalising, you'd like to see authors paid, and I'd like to see readers pay authors. I suspect both of us are willing to give a cut to some kind of distribution and rating people. Is that right?
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Well, assuming you actually used those people, then, sure.
Quote:
Originally Posted by moz
What I see now is that the service layer gets almost all the money, especially from people like me. For new material, I buy from bookshops for the most part, which means most of the money goes to the bookshop. For material that's not sold new, I either buy second hand books (I just paid $US25 for ~15 hardcover SF) in which case the second hand dealer gets the money, or I use the darknet and my ISP gets the money.
So, from the point of view of rewarding the authors, how do the two mechanisms above differ? As far as I can tell neither will reward the author at all. Well, except for the warm glow of knowing that someone loves them. Which doesn't pay the rent.
There's an opportunity there for the copyright holder to make a profit by selling the electronic editions for next to nothing (even $1/book) instead of actually nothing (what they get now). Amusingly, the author could probably in many cases simply resell the darknet edition with a comment from the author.
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Selling e-books does have the potential of getting more money for the original author, depending on how they set things up, instead of losing it to the second-hand market. I'm all for that, and I suspect the e-book market may eventually shut down the last of the used bookstores (sorry, used bookstore owners).
Quote:
Originally Posted by moz
They actually succeeded in doing that with radio, but as I'm sure you're aware it does not work very well.
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Actually, it does work well (if the system did not work, there would be no music radio). Exposure through radio promotes sales of albums, concerts, and other merchandise. Radio stations pay the royalties, making the music producers happy, and allowing them to continue playing music on radio. Commercial entities support the stations by buying commercial time. It's a system that has continued, basically unaltered, for over 70 years. Margins might be tight, but that system is still chugging along just fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by moz
The major problem from a content producer point of view is that without very strong centralised monitoring (which requires command and control), the tax is distributed unfairly. Either way, most of the money goes to the middlemen.
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Well, that's what middlemen are for: They get paid to do your dirty work. If you don't like it... you do their jobs and keep the money. (This is why I run my own website, get 100% of my profits, and the only person who gets a cut is my ISP, for letting me stay online. Don't worry, there was no reason you would know that.) In most cases, the "middlemen" can be minimized or removed, if you're willing to do the scut-work they generally handle for you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by moz
Actually, the longer people like you keep paying them to do it, and resisting every alternative, the longer the battle will go on.
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As I said, I don't pay middlemen (other than my ISP). I'm actively trying to change the system with my sales model, or at least help to develop alternatives. It's a choice we can all make.