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Originally Posted by Moejoe
That's insane! I didn't know that at all. I was labouring under the impression that the lion's share went to the publishers. So that then means that if a writer, say a Stephen King who has more money than he could ever possibly spend, set up an online imprint of his own, he could offer ebooks at a substantially lower price than other online retailers and make even more money? I wonder why none of the big writers has done this yet?
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My guess would be contracts - in order to get your book published and distributed through a particular company, you probably have to agree not to sell the same product outside of their channels.
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Originally Posted by Good Old Neon
But rather than purchase an entire CD, you can and have the ability to download individual tracks - for quite some time now.
I’m not going to defend the music industry, but I’m willing to forgive them for not having a working web-based business model in place given the near overnight (in business terms and time) explosion of filesharing websites and services.
Human nature is such that, if given a choice between paying for something, or getting it for free, especially when the negative consequences of doing so are hidden, the majority of times, we prefer free. But that, of course, does not make it right.
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Sure, we have that option now. When P2P was first becoming popular, there was no such thing, at least not to any large degree. No, it wouldn't have stopped P2P completely, but I think that P2P would not have become every-day to your average person, which is why it continues and grows.
I'm not at all saying that their actions make the reaction right or acceptable. I'm saying that the industry that proclaims the evils of P2P had a large, if indirect, part in creating it.
And of course we haven't at all discussed legal use of P2P, which are various. Just because it's P2P, that doesn't inherently make it wrong, or even illegal.