Sherman Alexie still hates ebooks

[kennyc]

Harjo has some wonderful poetry as well. If it's the same one I'm thinking of.

Yep, see: http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Became-...9969057&sr=1-3

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by EatingPie

Your distinction between piracy and bootlegging in terms of what makes one right and the other wrong is artificial. You claim that only difference is that one makes money off someone else's work. However, in both cases, the author lost money. Just a question of how much money.

No, the distinction is quite clear. The author will have lost money from piracy only if you can prove that the pirated copy would have been bought legally were it not available for free. Which of course it wouldn't have in the vast majority of cases. Your average pirate downloads dozens of music albums only to listen to some tracks once or twice and then forget about them completely. Most of these pirated tracks will not be played even once by the downloader. You can't seriously suggest these people would have actually paid hundreds or thousands of pounds for all these tracks (which they would then never even listen to) if they couldn't get them for free off the torrents.

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by kennyc

If you take something of mine without my permission, you are a thief.

Now there's only the small matter of defining "take" to be sorted out.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by meraxes

No, the distinction is quite clear. The author will have lost money from piracy only if you can prove that the pirated copy would have been bought legally were it not available for free. Which of course it wouldn't have in the vast majority of cases. Your average pirate downloads dozens of music albums only to listen to some tracks once or twice and then forget about them completely. Most of these pirated tracks will not be played even once by the downloader. You can't seriously suggest these people would have actually paid hundreds or thousands of pounds for all these tracks (which they would then never even listen to) if they couldn't get them for free off the torrents.

Wrong. It doesn't matter what you call it or what the conditions are. If you take something that is not yours to take you are a thief. Nothing else matters. People try to justify their behavior by saying no one is hurt, but it is simply not true, society is being destroyed by it.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by meraxes

Now there's only the small matter of defining "take" to be sorted out.

Not at all. If you possess it, without permission.

And don't start with me, I know you just want to argue, I'm not going to, this is the wrong thread anyway.

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Not at all. If you possess it, without permission.

Times of the world would flow in halcyon joy if things were that simple. And we wouldn't need lawyers. How do you "possess" something that exists in infinite copies? How do you "possess" an idea? A sound? A vision? Possessing the right to a book is not the same as possessing a sack of potatos. That's why we have all those different words in our language, Kenny - to denote different things, different ideas and different concepts. Lumping it all together might have served when the loo was on the other end of the cave. We have evolved a bit since then.

[ggareau]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Wrong. It doesn't matter what you call it or what the conditions are. If you take something that is not yours to take you are a thief. Nothing else matters. People try to justify their behavior by saying no one is hurt, but it is simply not true, society is being destroyed by it.

Ok, but by that logic if I pick a penny up off of the ground, I'm stealing. If you want to refine the logic so that it doesn't draw that analogy, then you'll have to define what "taking" and "not yours to take" mean.

And I never said that nobody is hurt - I said that you cannot prove that anybody is hurt. Many bands, for example, have made a lot of money by having their records stolen. Does it balance out in the end? Nobody knows.

Not at all. If you possess it, without permission.

See, now here's where I have an issue with definitions. If I buy an ebook with DRM, I don't actually possess it, I possess a license to use it. I "have" it in a 0z and 1s sort of way, but I don't actually possess it.

[kindlekitten]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Harjo has some wonderful poetry as well. If it's the same one I'm thinking of.

Yep, see: http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Became-...9969057&sr=1-3

yes, that's her. and Momaday is a Pultizer winner

[EatingPie]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Not at all. If you possess it, without permission.

And don't start with me, I know you just want to argue, I'm not going to, this is the wrong thread anyway.

I actually never meant this to go quite so far. I threw up my arms after my last post, pointless. And while initially on-topic, now it's the wrong thread indeed.

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

yes, that's her. and Momaday is a Pultizer winner

House Made of Dawn. I cannot remember reading this book, but I have always loved the title. It certainly deserved the Pulitzer for those 4 words alone!

For a quick read -- and free -- a short story I remember from one of the original Internet eZines "Intertext" called Skin the Color of Blood (Link).

-Pie

[Alan Kaufman]

Alan Kaufman in Huffington Post on Hi-Tech destruction of Books
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-k..._b_380536.html


Kaufman's essay in Evergreen Review on Electronic Bookburning:
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect..._b_380536.html

Kaufman moderating panel on Books and Hi-Tech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7seAE...layer_embedded

[Alan Kaufman]

Does it strike anyone here as strange that the two authors, Alan Kaufman and Sherman Alexie, who stand up to oppose the hi-tech cestruction of books are each the sons of genocided people? Kaufman (me) is son of a Holocaust survivor; Alexie is Native American.
Perhaps we intuit something that you don't, about how trashing of sacred cultural
artifacts such as the book has genocidal implications that you all, in your haste to embrace all these toys, may be unaware of, through no fault of your own. We just happened to be born to genocided people. And we're trying to warn you, alert you, that despite all the reassurances that it won't happen, can't happen, etc., the fact remains: hi-tech is destroying books and book culture. The book world is in collapse. And this bodes terribly for our culture and civilixation. It is a step into barbarism of the worst kind, though one may not immedioately see this.

[kindlekitten]

Alexie's chief issue with ereaders is that at this point in time he considers them a luxury item and not readily available to the general population.

I will respond to your other post later today. it is late here, 0012 hrs

[HansTWN]

The book and book culture are not in danger. And no, there is nothing "wrong" with paper books. There wasn't anything wrong with handwritten books when the printing press came along. We are just at such a stage of transformation. This transformation makes distribution and storage more efficient, and books even more accessible.

You say convenience is evil. Where I live few English books are available, why is the same book in physical form, that I have to order at a much greater cost and that I have to wait weeks for, more "worthy" than an electronic version that I purchase on a website and get immediately? Many people live a long way from bookstores, should they drive for hours just to get the same thing? Yes, some books are not well suited for ebook versions. That is when typesetting or diagrams, pictures, maps, etc are important. Or when they are not meant to be read linearly. But when the text, the message is the essence, then it really doesn't matter.

If you read your original post and review the words you yourself have used you can hardly blame others for reacting in kind or ridiculing you. Your family went through unspeakable sufferings, we all feel for you. But this makes it even more difficult for us to understand how you can equate a simple "form shifting" with the destruction of culture and compare us to those butchers of humanity? A form shifting which actually makes censorship even more difficult, which enables the message to be spread around the world in no time, evading those that want to destroy the freedom to read.

Imagine if ebooks had been available during the 3rd Reich. Now matter how many books the Nazis would have burned, people could have instantaneously replaced them with new ones. And it would have been virtually impossible to track and control people's minds. What if there had been an internet? Cell phones with cameras? Overnight the whole world would have known what terrible atrocities the Nazis committed and they would have been stopped much earlier. What better way to stop tyranny then such technology? You really can't see how terribly wrong and unjust your comparison is?

TV has been working at destroying reading and book culture, but electronic books are actually helping books make a comeback. Tech is not a general evil, it is just the question of how it is used and abused -- just like everything else.

[zacheryjensen]

Originally Posted by Crowl

Sorry, I should have said loss of income for the author rather than a lost sale of a new book even if the two things are effectively the same thing, apparently I was unclear.

That doesn't change a single thing about what I said. Resale is not loss of income or sale or any term you want to come up with. It's part of the way markets work, has always been, and should always be. The effort to undermine this through indoctrinating propaganda is relatively new, and it's insidious. It's an unfounded and often tautological approach to justify further erosion of individual rights to be replaced by corporate rights for the singular goal of making more money without offering a better product or doing more work.

Of course authors should be rewarded for their creations but frankly they are not nearly special or rare enough in this world that somehow they deserve to have the rights of others taken away in the name of making themselves more money. Same goes for any other entity in the chain of supply between purchaser and producer.

If I choose to resell the right I purchased to read a book I should be able to do that as I please. It's no different than reselling a tomato I bought at the store. Both actions are perfectly legal and have never caused harm to markets. In fact, it is this reselling that makes industry and markets possible.

After all, at the end of the day, you're almost never buying a book/license directly from the author. You're buying it from some company that bought it from some other company that bought it from another company or agent that found the author. Other similar chains exist, of course.

The noxious cloud of mythology floating around these boards these days is becoming rather suffocating.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

Does it strike anyone here as strange that the two authors, Alan Kaufman and Sherman Alexie, who stand up to oppose the hi-tech cestruction of books are each the sons of genocided people? Kaufman (me) is son of a Holocaust survivor; Alexie is Native American.
Perhaps we intuit something that you don't, about how trashing of sacred cultural
artifacts such as the book has genocidal implications that you all, in your haste to embrace all these toys, may be unaware of, through no fault of your own. We just happened to be born to genocided people. And we're trying to warn you, alert you, that despite all the reassurances that it won't happen, can't happen, etc., the fact remains: hi-tech is destroying books and book culture. The book world is in collapse. And this bodes terribly for our culture and civilixation. It is a step into barbarism of the worst kind, though one may not immedioately see this.

A bit of an extreme view in my opinion and you have no corner on the intuition market regardless of heritage. Things change, they always change. The change may be good, it may be bad, but life goes on. Agriculture changed everything. The industrial age change everything, computers are now changing everything. adapt or die, that is the way life works for good or bad.