View Single Post
Old 02-14-2023, 08:38 AM   #13
maddz
Wizard
maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.maddz ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 1,411
Karma: 30039536
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: UK
Device: Kobo Forma, Icarus, iPad Mini 2, Kobo Touch, Google Nexus 7
With reference to piracy of fiction, do away with geo-restrictions, DRM and vendor walled gardens, and I think a lot of reasons for piracy disappear. More will disappear if ebook versions are available as standard when the book is 'in print', and all such ebooks are freely convertible between formats (necessary when you need to use accessibility tools). Also, the price of the ebook should reflect that you are not paying for printing or physical storage and transport costs.

I also think that the price of keeping copyright 'alive' on an edition or work should include offering an ebook version at all times at a reasonable price (so no charging at £25 for mass-market fiction that currently sells at an average of £10). If there is no accessible (i.e. not some obscure language in a remote territory) version available, then the book should revert to worldwide public domain. This might need to be qualified for non-English authors writing in their native language for sale only in their native country, but if you are distributing something worldwide, then there must be an accessible version available worldwide. (Yeah, yeah I know - the dominance of English as a default lingua franca and the colonial legacy thereof.)

I buy books if I want to read them; and I want to read them on a device of my choice regardless of where I purchased them. In some cases I buy an ebook to replace a disintegrating much-loved paperback, or when a book has updated content, or I physically can't hold the paper copy anymore.

I'm not going to get into the arguments pro and con piracy around academic publishing.
maddz is offline   Reply With Quote