Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
The moral issue of "reading without paying the author" is the same whether the book is borrowed from a friend, bought at a yard sale, or picked up from a free box set in a park somewhere. Putting it on filesharing sites is a just a change of scale.
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I'm not sure I agree, because I think scale matters here. The pricing of paper books takes into account that 6-10 people will read the books per sale. Changing the scale of sharing changes the validity of that estimate. What do you suppose the scale change really is? Let's say 100 times as many people will download the book as would have borrowed it from a local friend. Whatever portion of the price of a book that relates to that factor should probably be multiplied by 100. While it's not the full price of the book, I'd say it's probably at least $1.00 per book. So to take this kind of sharing model into account, each original copy would have to sell for something like $125. Of course, at that price very few people will buy books at all, so you might as well go for the patronage/presale model I suggested earlier.
Or, authors could go in the other direction, making online books inexpensive and DRM-free, as several authors who have posted here do, and hope that most people will buy their books rather than download them without paying. The problem we run into there is that perceived value sometimes falls proportionately to cost, so if the price goes too low, people won't buy at all and won't have any hesitation about uploading the file to a sharing site. Also, micropayments are still difficult to manage-- the credit card companies and PayPal want quite a cut per transaction.
I think we'll find one or more workable solutions within the next few years, but the current model isn't going to hold up much longer.