Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
I am not sure where this whole book commissar idea came from, but certainly not from me.
My issue isn't really with the knockoffs, their titles are usually funny. I like to browse the independent sections of most bookstores and Amazon's is filled with all sorts of garbage. Certainly Amazon has been and continues to work on reducing the amount of garbage, the signal to noise ratio and all that. I just think that taking away the option for the garbage purveyors to make any money would disincentive them to produce garbage in the first place.
The garbage could still be uploaded and downloaded of course, freedom of speech and all that, but if someone downloads two texts, and finds one of them to be garbage, only spending a minute or two reading it, while spending a few hours reading the other one, it is quite obvious which creator should be compensated.
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You didn't use the term "book commissar", but that is exactly what you propose. Right now, readers determine which authors get compensated by buying the books. Readers determine what is trash and what is treasure. You propose taking that out of their hands, and putting the decision for who gets compensated in someone else's hands. You propose e-readers that spy on what and when we read to determine who gets paid. The book commissar not only determines who gets paid, but how much they get paid. You have proposed forbidding authors from selling their work.
What possible difference does it make how much time someone spent reading a book. If you have two books of equal length, and someone devours a book in two hours, while someone else slogs though a book in 8 hours, how can the book commissar tell which book the reader valued more? Did the reader read so fast because they enjoyed it so much, or did they just skim through it? The book commissar can't tell this. The reader knows exactly how they value the book.