Proposal for undercutting Pirates

[JeremyR]

The thing is, I think that's basically how it works now - you can presumably find virtually anything in a pirate edition.

So why do people buy books? Because they want to support the author. And convenience is also a factor (though often simply doing a search on google will turn up books). But if piracy were such a problem, there literally would be no book sales.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

If an author sells 50,000 copies and gets $1 royalty per copy, he gets $50,000.
If 1% only pay he gets $500.

$50,000 seems reasonable compensation at a glance, although if the author publishes once every 3 years and writes full time, it works out to a pretty small annual income.

And, of course, most open source software donations are above $1 per copy.

I don't think the buyer should have total control over whether payment is made, unless the author of software developer grants them that right.

It is like stealing carrots from a farmers field. One little carrot won't hurt him we think, but if 99% of all carrots are stolen, soon no-one would be tempted to grow carrots.

Helen

If 50,000 people read a book by an author I think that author should be very happy and continue to write.

Let's just assume that 10% of the people who read the book liked it, that's 5000 people who are now interested in the author and people for whom hopefully the author has had the foresight to gain some contact info for. For the author's next work there is now an already interested base of people for whom the conversion rate to paying readers should be significantly higher than 1%. Some would pay less than what the author believes their work to be worth, but some would pay more, some would probably pay alot more, depending on how much THEY think the book is worth, and how much of their income they can afford to spend on words.

With the advent of Internet 2.0 this will all be academic. The network will know what you download, know how long you spend with the media that you download, know how much you make in a year, and then subtract the right amount from your network account and transfer it to the creator.

[DuckieTigger]

Very nice said Giggleton.

I also believe that there is going to be a lot more downloads than actual readers. So it is really hard to say how much lost revenue there is. There is also that thought that if someone donates it will be around what a similar ebook would cost in a regular store. That is roughly 3 times more than what the author would get from his cut in the store (at the same price). If alot of people only pay say 50 cents then maybe the book wasn't as good as the writer thought it was.

[Matth79]

There are some "pay what you like" models, though I wonder how effective they are.

Donation-ware, similarly (must remember to throw something in the Calibre pot), not sure how effective - if it comes to "donate or else", those things are often referred to derogatorily as "pleadware".