Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Well, digital piracy, copying protected works and distributing or downloading them for free, means authors have to work like slaves, for free. So?
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Are you quite sure about that? The economics might not work the way you think they do, at least for authors. They've certainly changed for musicians. Ask Radiohead.
Cory Doctorow distributes his books for free in digital format, at the same time he is selling pbooks through normal publishers. He distributes audiobooks without DRM. He points out that the problem for most authors is not that pirates or anyone else steal their books, but rather, that people don't
know about their books.
Perhaps every "pirated" book is actually a kind of advertisement for the author. Perhaps readers, or at least enough readers, are willing to reward authors for writing, by paying for books they can get for free. Perhaps the correlation you are assuming, that every "pirated book" is a lost sale, is wrong. Perhaps pirating increases sales by increasing the potential audience.
I've thought that if I were an author, I might regard the pirate sites as one of my reseller sites. I'd put my website in every book, asking that if the reader enjoyed the book, go to the website & drop a few bucks in my tip jar. And on my website, I'd link to PayPal, and when someone dropped me some pennies, I'd
link them to the pirate sites, saving myself for having to store the ebook on my own site, at my own expense, paying for the downloading bandwidth.
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"Your old road is rapidly aging
please get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand
for the times, they are a changin'"
- Bob Dylan