[anamardoll]

Can we talk about Harry Potter for a bit? I would like that.

I have a friend who would like to read the Harry Potter books. She read the first couple and wasn't really blown away, but she enjoyed all the movies, and decided she'd read it all after the movie series was done. To that end, she bought all the Potter books and kept them neat and shiny on her shelves.

Now, for various reasons of disability, she's finding that she has to convert her entire library to ebooks. Lifting and holding and holding open physical books is just too painful for her to do. But of course there are no Harry Potter ebooks because [insert rant here].

So here is what my friend did, because my friend is rich enough that she can afford to do this. She packed up her Harry Potter books and sent them to a professional scanning place, which is legal in her place of residence. The scanning place costs about a dollar per hundred pages, and the postage for mailing the books worked out to another $2 per book. Then the conversion software she uses to go from PDF to ePUB was several hundred dollars as well, so IF she never converts anything again, the whole process was almost $50 per Harry Potter book. Ouch.

Some people will argue that my friend could have just gone and gotten a pirated copy since she already owned the paper versions in the first place. A problem with that, of course, is that my friend doesn't WANT the paper copies lying around gathering dust for the rest of her life. Even if she didn't resell the books, if she pulped the books so that there was an appropriate sacrifice to the IP gods, there would be no record that she'd acted legally or in good faith. So she chose to go with a scanning service that keeps good records.

Piracy is complicated. There are a hundred issues of access, of disability, of so many things that most people cannot even think of on their own. To just boil it down to a culture of "entitlement" is simplistic and it renders invisible people who are like my friend yet cannot afford to pay $50 per Harry Potter book just to be able to read it.

(Now, I know the usual knee-jerk response to this is that Life Isn't Fair and that disabled, impoverished children should just suck it up that they can't read Harry Potter. But keep in mind that holding this position makes you more "entitled" than any pirate I've ever personally known.)