Quote:
Originally Posted by plib
If the potential purchasers of the deceased author's work spend their money on his books then they will not have that income to spend on a new aspiring author, who as a result will starve to death in poverty in a garret, enduring what seems to be the usual fate of authors to die young leaving their children penniless and a charge upon the state, while society will not benefit from the expression of the new and unique ideas which died with him. Meanwhile the sales of the expired author will inevitably taper off as market saturation is reached, leaving the employees of the publishers and retailers unemployed and paying no taxes.
Which scenario is better for society?
|
People buy books based on the interest they have in the story, not the interest they have in the writer. How many garrets had the corpses of "aspiring authors" in them as a result of the huge demand for Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy? (It must be hard to rent a garret nowadays, the smell of decomposition is really hard to remove.)