Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
But that's how books have always worked. Maybe not 10/80... but grade schools buy books that get used by several years' worth of students, libraries buy books for dozens of people to read; people loan books to friends and give them away when they're done. The majority of reading is not done by the original purchaser.
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You are right. But look at the differences. I can read a book from the local public library. But I have to go there, and the book is not always in good condition. Then, I have to take it back. With digital goods the copy is as good as the original -- and always shiny new. Once you have a copy for free, why buy another one? Answer: to pay the author. So if we want a system where people can download e-books without DRM and pay for them when they can get exactly the same for free, you have to educate people for the importance of paying. That *might* work. Just might. Alas, neither the industry nor the pirates are educating the public.
BTW, note that free sometimes is very expensive. One should not forget that. Say you have a great idea for an email client. You develop it for a year on your spare time. Then, what? Nothing. Unless you can use that to be hired by some giant corporation like Google or Microsoft or Mozilla, there is nothing you can do as an independent author because you would have to compete with free products like Thunderbird and Live Mail. How can you compete with that? You cannot.
So our digital El Dorado is turning out to be very much like our undigital life: you may be very creative, but in order to make a television show, because no one pays for that directly, you need a big corporation behind you, and that means lots of ads and lots of lies and lots of controls in place. There goes the dream that once was the Internet: a digital medium that would empower the independent author, bypassing the big corporations. And if you look carefully you will see that book publishers and the music industry however evil they may be, paid pronto to their authors and made it possible for them to live off their creativity, entirely financed by those who bought their music and books. This was the fairest system ever concocted to finance authors. Unfortunately, it is something that will never happen with e-music or e-books and will tend to disappear even when it comes to software.