Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
You do realise that the largest movie market in the world is the porn industry, right?  And yet nobody confuses the medium with the message there (I hope).
Similarly with books (and authors): most works are not meant to educate, or to make one think; they're just meant to entertain. As such, they're fairly interchangeable, and, I dare say, will not be remembered in 10 years time, let alone 100. Books are just a container, after all.. The fact that words are contained in it says nothing about the (quality of the) content. |
I am not sure that Porn is the largest movie industry in the world. Certainly Bollywood makes an awful lot of films and a lot of money changes hands in Hollywood for films.
Yes, most novels (substituting it for books) are not not meant to educate... in fact I have never had much time for novels that are meant to educate. And to invoke Sturgeon's law, 95% of them are crap. But 5% of them are worth reading and remembering.
In any case, to my mind, complaining about what the publishing industry is currently publishing (in this thread) seems to be more a rationalization as to why one shouldn't feel guilty about illegally sharing books.
I agree with a lot of what people in this thread have said about middle men, and authors getting too little for their efforts. That being said, the current system at least gets the authors some compensation. Illegal file sharing does not.
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Bill