[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

And once you had purchased the used p-book and found you liked it the reason that you searched the darknet to find a e-book copy instead of purchasing it from Amazon was …? You felt that you had already compensated the author, even by purchasing a used paper copy? If you had found the book on the darknet before buying the paper version?

I've pretty much come to the point where if there's an ebook version I'll buy it, and if there's not, I have no qualms about getting a darknet version. I have no sympathy for authors and publishers who want to restrict publication to analog versions. I'm not going to haul around a two inch thick book when there's an e-version available, and I'm certainly not going to reward people for not selling me what I want, and insisting that it's the two inch thick book, or nothing. They can have their wish - they sell me nothing.

So, do I think I need to jump through hoops to compensate the author? Nope. It's real simple to get me to pay for an ebook - have one available to sell.

it is still not clear to me in your model how authors who produce the original content will be fairly compensated for their creativity and time spent in producing the work. All the talk of book clubs and such just sounds to me like additional overhead that will not be provided by the author at all, but by some third party.

I was talking about publishers, not authors, and my point was that publishers, as merchandisers of books and newspapers, seem to me to be selling the wrong thing to the consumer in the digital world. The wrong thing is content, the right thing is access and convenience.

Notwithstanding what the publishers are selling, they still need content. It's just that content is not enough to support sales when the pirates can have it available for free. Publishers will still have to acquire content from authors and other creators.

I don't see the authors as being in competition with the pirates. They are really in competition with each other.