Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
That's the way many publishers used to work with writers' stables: You were commissioned to write a book, you wrote for them, you got paid.
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Publishers could do this now... but they use the royalty system to allow them to pay a smaller fee to the writer up front, and allow the rest to be dictated by actual sales. IOW, they're taking much of their risk out of the equation. Get publishers to accept the risk, and you're cool.
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Right, but that would shift the problem to the publishers. If there is no copyright and anyone could reproduce and sell written works... why would a publisher pay someone to write a book, if after it is written every other publisher can sell the same book?
For public-domain books, anyone can publish them, fine... but no one payed to get them written (or at least they got quite a few years of "exclusive rights").