Quote:
Originally Posted by CazMar
If we stop paying authors to write books we probably won't have any new books.
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So the instant an author dies, all their books should be destroyed?
Seriously, that's what your position comes down to. You're saying that readers should be paying authors (even authors of books we don't want to read, apparently) so they'll continue to write. Aside from that seeming like welfare to me, we keep coming back to the idea that only books which will pay authors should be sold.
By the way, take a look at fanfiction.net sometime. Take a weed-whacker -- 90% of what's there is utterly terrible, and 90% of the rest is merely bad. But in that last 1%, in stories which cannot
ever be sold, nor, in most cases, even connected to any other identity of the author, and enhance that author's future reputation, there is some very, very good writing. I've read FFN fanfic that's as good as anything I've ever seen between covers, and better than a lot. It's stuff people write for the sheer joy of writing it. Music is a purely mercenary endeavor to you, but it isn't to many people (have you ever heard a really good organization or town musical group perform? I have). And neither is writing. So your premise is wrong from the beginning just on that basis. And prior to the advent of mass publishing and widespread literacy, few people made much money off of writing. They wrote anyway. So, it would appear that other motives for writing exist than making a buck off it.
But let's say you're right. Let's say everybody stops buying books, and just reads public-domain books. That would be, in effect, rolling back the calendar to 1923, with a few excursions as late as the 1960s for stories and books whose copyrights weren't renewed. Well ...
there was no shortage of books then. I would guess that, on a per-capita basis, people read more books
then than they do
now. Enough books already existed to supply them with a lifetime of reading. They weren't reading books that weren't even going to be published until 2011, obviously. So, in actual fact, providing incomes to modern authors is not actually necessary to have a lifetime full of books to read, and
hasn't been since shortly after Gutenberg invented movable type (or possibly just popularized it, or possibly just popularized it in the West).
But, in any event, I wasn't saying that nobody should buy new books (though I
do think that nobody should
rent new books for prices surpassing that of buying them, which is what most ebook "sales" are). My ebook reader contains books published centuries ago and books published weeks ago (note:
Agatha H. and the Airship City is major fun!). I was just responding to the person who said that the idea that someone would read an old book instead of buying a new one was a fallacy.
Sweetpea, I'm sorry to hear that. One of the advantages of English, it seems, is that it's mostly stayed the same for the past few hundred years. With the exception of some shifts in word usage, like "stunt" not meaning exactly what it did around 1900, a book written a hundred years ago is just as readable as a book written today. It's easy to forget that other languages haven't held still, either through natural forces or government action.