[tompe]

Originally Posted by nekokami

While this may be true, in the strictest sense, most of the authors I read are able to write full-time, and I think their writing is much better because of this. They are able to devote their full attention to their craft. (Would you rather go to a doctor who is a doctor full-time, or one that has a day job delivering packages and only treats the sick in their "spare time?")

Well it depends how good the author is I suppose... Iain Banks writes a couple of months a year and the books used to be good. The point was that if you can live on your writing you will in some way also be able to bring in the money if all books are ebooks and if it is technically possible to copy them.

I don't support DRM, because I don't think it works. Pirates are able to break DRM, and in fact regard it as an attractive challenge to do so, whereas regular customers are frequently restricted unfairly by DRM systems. But I still think authors should be paid.

I think that it is a good thing if a good author can live on his writing all other things equal.

I know we can borrow books from friends or the library, or buy used books. The statistics I've seen say that each book is read by 4 people, on the average. That's already built into the system that compensates authors. I suppose if you want to justify downloading books from the darknet, you could be sure to pay cover price for at least 1/4 of the books you download and get close to the level of compensation the authors are getting. But I would really hope that if a store offered DRM-free books at reasonable prices, you'd simply pay for most or all of your books.

So then people should be able to accept that an ebook is read by a certain number of other people without them paying for it and that it is built into the system. I think that the number of people reading without paying in some way for a DRM free ebook will be about the same as for paper books.