[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Yet the author and publisher may feel cheated. If you downloaded it when it was $15 and bought it when it was $5, you are mucking around with their decision to place a premium on new releases.

Generally, I downloaded before they were available from authorized digital sources at all. A couple were Baen ebooks; the prices on those don't change over time.

I'm not going to feel a lot of guilt for getting digital copies of books I owned in paper. Nor for allowing someone else to do the work of conversion for me; there's no moral imperative to waste hours of my time duplicating someone else's effort in order to avoid supporting an abusive commerce system (DRM) or to get content a publisher hasn't deemed worthwhile to release for sale at all.

For the most part, I agree with you. As Doctorow claims, obscurity is the author's worse enemy. Yet shouldn't the author/publisher be deciding how to promote their work?

Deciding how to promote? Sure. Deciding how their work should reach me? Less sure. They get to decide what options to explore, not how their books are distributed afterthe point of first sale. They don't get to tell me how much I have to spend to read their books; only how much I have to spend to get an authorized first-sale copy. If they want me to pay attention to site licenses that seem to say that I'm not allowed to share ebooks with my husband, they'll need to coordinate with those sites to spell out the terms a lot more clearly, and probably change the "buy this book" button to a "license access to this content" button.

But the decision is placed in their hands based upon what they think their bests interests are, rather than in the hands of others who are dictating what their supposed best interests are.

I'm not pretending I'm supporting their best interests. I'm a reader with money to spend; it's my interests they should be concerned with, not the other way around. Would I be happy if all authors stopped writing? Of course not. Is it going to happen? Hell no, so people can stop throwing that red herring around.

Some particular authors might stop writing, but the field has *always* been crowded with people who stop writing for various personal reasons. "I might not make as much money as I would have if people treated my works like I want them to" is not a viewpoint I have a lot of sympathy for. Neither is "people are reading my work without paying for it!", which, as I've said, is insulting to everyone who grew up reading used books.

I spent more money at DriveThruRPG than at Smashwords last year. More than that at e23.com. Everything I bought is available on the torrents; I make a conscious decision to support authors and publishers whose methods I like, who don't treat me like a criminal they're trying to scam before I scam them.

I have considered stopping buying ebooks at all, and sticking to Creative Commons releases, promotional freebies, public domain works, and fanfic. It's not like I'd run out of things to read. So far, I'm still leaning towards "support the authors and publishers I like with money," but that's partially because I have leisure income.

I feel no qualms about telling people on tighter budgets than me that no, the digital content age doesn't have the equivalent of used book stores, so until someone comes up with it, give up on paid ebooks and here's where to find the legit freebies. Get back to me when you've gone through a few hundred of those and I can try to help you find paid books within your budget--or I can show you how to find more legit freebies.

While I can also help people find unauthorized books, I'm much happier showing them how to find ways to flip off the system without breaking any rules. There's something satisfying in being able to say "I read a million words last month, all provided to me for free by people who were happy to do so;" with a less direct secondary message of "so, if authors want me to buy their works? They'll need to come up with a stronger sales pitch than 'you might enjoy reading this.'"