[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by petrucci

I presented the studies as having to do with the availability of free books. This related to my argument about competition and its relation to public domain works.

The studies were about whether or not making things free was a good marketing strategy. They had nothing to do with the public domain.

I see what you are saying, that Austen is not competing for a person's time because it is a given that she will read it. However, what I am saying is that there is a finite number of books that a person will read. If a person reads Austen, then there is one fewer other book that the person will read. This effectively means that there is a shorter list of books that the person will read. A shorter list means fewer purchased books, and presumably less money for authors.

If a person was going to read Jane Austen anyway, Austen's books can't possibly compete for time. Since people read Jane Austen even when they had to pay for a paper copy, it is clear that she would have been read anyway.

This may currently be the case in law, and I do not dispute that.

It's more than just law; in the US it would take a Constitutional amendment to make copyright eternal.

A few of them may switch to a marginal author. However, this is not the thrust of my argument. I am not advocating the non-availability of older books. I wish to see a level playing field, so that new authors do not have to compete with free classics. The old books should be in copyright and cost money, just like new books.

On the contrary, that is the core of your argument. Your argument is that authors struggle to sell books because people are reading the classics. The only way this can happen is if these struggling authors would be the recipients of increased book sales if the classics weren't freely available.

If readers weren't able to read Austen, and thus read a new book instead, (that's a big assumption - they might simply read less books) it isn't credible that the book read would be from a marginal author. People don't read public domain books just because they are free. Most public domain books are rarely read if at all. A handful are classics, and would be read whether or not people had to pay for them.

I certainly appreciate your point of view. However, there are laws about selling products for less than it costs to produce them. There is a real danger from subsidised merchandise. Authors will not be able to afford to write a better book, as the market will not bear the price.

If the author is not otherwise working, then writing the books and distributing them freely is a form of price subsidy.

That works for fungible goods, where all goods are the same. Gas prices are one such example. There have been cases where one chain would lower their price to the point where competitors couldn't stay in business. Then when the competitors closed their doors, the chain would raise their prices.

E-books aren't fungible. Lowering your price can't drive competitors out of business because books aren't interchangeable. The market will bear the price of good books, this is indisputably clear, because people do pay for good books.

And no, it is not a form of price subsidy, someone not charging for a piece of fan fiction isn't a price subsidy.