Well, I'm afraid I'd never heard of you before today, but I would offer a few thoughts, based on my observations of people's behaviour on download sites (of
pirated materials), especially as it pertains to music and ebook downloads:
0. I myself hugely dislike and distrust Paypal. Also, Paypal is fairly expensive to use, which might matter for Asians (because you need to have a CC in order to credit the account)
1. A huge number of people download but never look at ebooks; this is a pure magpie instinct, coupled with a vague idea of "it's good, and doesn't cost anything to download it now, and I might feel like it later". The exact same thing applies to classical music downloads.
2. People don't like having to share things back; protocols like the torrent protocol force people to do so at least to some degree, but whenever they can get away with something, the majority will choose to do so.
3. You might have attracted downloads because of the "novelty" of downloading something for free legally.
4. during most of this 2-year period, ebook-reader sales were still in their infancy. The lack of a comfortable reading platform likely discouraged people from "having a look" at your book.
Now, I can't tell you what kind of weights to apply to any of the points made above, but may I, as an antidote to the slightly depressed undercurrent, suggest you read the article "Culture is Ordinary" by Raymond Williams?
The point I was reminded of by reading your post was this: (
Excuse length)
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Raymond Williams
My second reason is historical: I deny, and can prove my denial, that popular education and commercial culture are cause and effect. I have shown elsewhere that the myth of 1870 — the education act which is said to have produced, as its children grew up, a new cheap and nasty press — is indeed myth. There was more than enough literacy, long before 1870, to support a cheap press, and in fact there were cheap and really bad newspapers selling in great quantities before the 1870 act was heard of. The bad new commercial culture came out of the social chaos of industrialism, and out of the success, in this chaos, of the 'masses' formula, not out of popular education. Northcliffe did few worse things than start this myth, for while the connection between bad culture and the social chaos of industrialism is significant, the connection between it and popular education is vicious. The Northcliffe revolution, by the way, was a radical change in the financial structure of the press, basing it on a new kind of revenue — the new mass advertising of the 1890s — rather than the making of a cheap popular press, in which he had been widely and successfully preceded. But I tire of making these points. Everyone prefers to believe Northcliffe. Yet does nobody, even a Royal Commission, read the most ordinarily accessible newspaper history? When people do read the history, the false equation between popular education and commercial culture will disappear forever. Popular education came out of the other camp, and has had quite opposite effects.
The second false equation is this: that the observable badness of so much widely distributed popular culture is a true guide to the state of mind and feeling, the essential quality of living of its consumers. Too many good men have said this for me to treat it lightly, but I still, on evidence, can't accept it. It is easy to assemble, from print and cinema and television, a terrifying and fantastic congress of cheap feelings and moronic arguments. It is easy to go on from this and assume this deeply degrading version of the actual lives of our contemporaries. Yet do we find this confirmed, when we meet people? This is where 'masses' comes in again, of course: the people we meet aren't vulgar, but god, think of Bootle and Surbiton and Aston! I haven't lived in any of those places; have you?
[...]
Now the false analogy, that we must also reject, this is known, in discussions of culture, as a 'kind of Gresham’s law'. Just as bad money will drive out good, so bad culture will drive out good, and this, it is said, has in fact been happening. If you can't see, straight away, the defect of the analogy, your answer, equally effective, will have to be historical. For in fact, of course, it has not been happening. There is more, much more bad culture about; it is easier, now, to distribute it, and there is more leisure to receive it. But test this in any field you like, and see if this has been accompanied by a shrinking consumption a things we can all agree to be good. The editions of good literature are very much larger than they were; the listeners to good music are much more numerous than they were; the number of people who look at good visual art is larger than it has ever been. If bad newspapers drive our good newspapers, by a kind of Gresham’s law, why is it that, allowing for the rise in population, The Times sells nearly three times as many copies as in the days of its virtual monopoly of the press, in 1850? It is the law I am questioning, not the seriousness of the facts as a whole. Instead of a kind of Gresham’s law, keeping people awake at nights with the now orthodox putropian nightmare, let us put it another way, to fit the actual facts: we live in an expanding culture, and all the elements in this culture are themselves expanding.
|
Now, admittedly Williams wrote this quite some time before the advent of the internet, and it may very well be that relational reading/"hypertext" will change expectations somewhat, but for me, I would argue that this change is for the better. That is, I am immensely, hugely annoyed when I read a newspaper that doesn't cite its sources. In part because the writing tends to be rather shoddy, specifically when it comes to science reporting, but the larger point I would draw is the following: "footnoting" through these hyperlinks can also be used for "good". Basically, I am just not willing to assume that the internet will turn all of us into slugs.
The point that is not often noticed or drawn attention to is that we are getting an ever larger amount of input from the "classes" that in earlier days would have been pretty much entirely mute (because of a lack of social access to the media). This will surely lead to more dross, and a lower signal-to-noise ratio, but it is accompanied by a less noticeable (because less controversial) growth of the somewhat-higher-educated. So remain hopeful for our collective culture, even if you aren't being remunerated for your freely distributed books yet.
