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Originally Posted by Giggleton
Should we not compensate creators for producing texts that we enjoy, while at the same time allowing universal access to all texts?
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You're floating around at 50,000 feet. I have a few questions about your sentence above that may help ground the conversation.
1. Who are the "creators?"
A member of my wife's family is an editor who has both worked as a publisher employee and as a freelance. And there are published books where she is more the author than the person on the cover. As Alfred A. Knopf Sr once wrote,
Today authors submit manuscripts and editors write books. Always? Certainly not. But given that this possibility must be sorted out for each book, I believe that there has to be a sorter, and, if the book isn't self-published, the sorter has to be the publisher. No one else is in a position to pay the various people involved in creating the book, such as the author, editor, agent, translator, sundry assistants, graphic designers, and any finance people who figured out how much of an advance was affordable. Agreed?
2. Who is "we?" Everyone on earth? All literate people? Or just people in the most prosperous English speaking countries? If the latter, they already have near-universal access through inter-library loan. All it takes is patience.
3. What does enjoyment have to do with it? If enjoyment just means that someone finished the book, how is the government going to figure out which books really get read, as opposed to people just downloading books because they like what the author stands for politically, and want to give him or her money without actually reading the book?
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Placing texts behind a paywall does not seem morally sound.
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What is so special about getting a text right away in the format that you personally prefer? Surely a right to free medical care, free food, and even free dental implants would come before free texts. I'd say that getting your reading material, instantly, in the preferred format is a nice to have luxury item way down of the list of stuff government could provide if it, one day, has some revenue to spare. The only immorality comes into play when a government makes it impossible to get the text, which brings back the question of who this "we" is.
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by any ethical standard place the text into a postmodern public domain ...
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Your ethical standards are not the only ones possible.
P.S. After all the above negativity, Giggleton, I just want to thank you for bringing up what I consider real issues concerning how the internet challenges existing economic models for publishing. I admire willingness to stand up for what you believe even when your ideas are unpopular.