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Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

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Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#71

Post by freetanga »

easymodex wrote: post #59
freetanga wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many authors also live paycheck to paycheck, and dropping 50 bucks on their utility or supermarket bill might be very important to them. You don’t need to make 500k at a FAANG to pay for a 50$ book. While I understand some people could be in such a spot, I think many people use this argument to wash their conscience.

How much of those 50$ get taken by the publishers, managers, etc.? I'd much rather pay for stuff if i knew it actually went to the person who wrote it.

I agree - and your point actually reinforces mine: your 50$ translates into 10$ of the authors utility bill. They probably need it more than you do.

I don’t know why an author would get into such a unbalanced commercial relationship with a publisher, but it’s common for this to happen, and at the end of the day, it was their choice: Price tag is 50$. Let’s not use fake morality high ground to continue stealing from the original author.

If you don’t like the current publishing industry or cannot afford the price tag: just don’t buy it, choose another cheaper book, or try a Public library or learn by experience and write your own free book...

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#72

Post by FreeFull »

RandomBacon wrote: post #70
Multicomp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how long that state will continue, because after all with creative cloud, even students are having to pay an exorbitant amount of money in order to learn how to use the software. Pirating CS6 can only go on so long, right? After a while its ui will simply be too out of date compared to the current cc offering right?

Interesting thought. How is GIMP coming along these days? Any other open source projects people recommend?

Blender is one of the best pieces of 3D modelling software on the market, and it's open source.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#73

Post by Invictus0 »

pjc50 wrote: post #54
musicale wrote: post #45

It's a major embarrassment for humanity that we've created an astonishing library system – books in scanned or native digital format, inexpensive smartphones/e-reader devices, and the internet – that could give billions of people on the planet the ability to read nearly any book ever published essentially for free, but for narrow business reasons we're doing the best we can to prevent that eventuality from ever happe…

Sure, but how are writers to get paid? It's hardly the most lucrative business to start with.

Sell paper books

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#74

Post by leggomylibro »

dsabanin wrote: post #69
VvR-Ox wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably like musicians and a lot of them use platforms to publish their songs to listen to for free to gain momentum and attract enough people who will be delighted to get a Vinyl (in case of books it would be a hard cover). When I personally used pirated stuff it was because I couldn't afford to buy it or there was no other possibility to get a digital copy that is easier to search and transport. It is only greed t…

I think you should become the change you want to see in the world and stop charging for your work. I wonder how that will go.

A lot of people on this forum probably are pretty happy-go-lucky with their negotiating.

The difference between $200k and $300k is a lot, but I see a lot of unattached young people not really caring. Ironically, it seems much smaller than the difference between $20k and $30k.

But most artists don't have people breaking their door down to compete for their time. And anyways, coding is a creative profession; I'm sure that plenty of techies are aspiring artists who didn't like their odds.

I'm surprised that more people don't see exclusively 'ex post facto' rewards as a sort of corrupting influence on the creation of art, rather than a motivator.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#75

Post by jhbadger »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #53
mirimir wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but libraries must buy books to loan. For physical books, there's only one concurrent user. And for ebooks, licenses specify allowed numbers of concurrent users. But still, that is an interesting argument. So why aren't libraries considered to be pirating?

IIRC, there have been that claim: Libraries, of course, were going to put book publishers out of business because all of their patrons were reading books they otherwise would have purchased. We simply don't hear of this pushback much anymore and we more see it as a public good - though not always good enough to fund them properly or make sure everyone has access to one for free.

It's more complicated than that; in the 19th century when libraries (at the time mostly subscription ones akin to a Victorian Netflix) were the primary purchasers of books rather than individuals, novels were extremely expensive -- the typical novel at the time was a rambling 1000+ page affair taking up three volumes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel) and cost over 30 shillings. That's like £150 or $200 today! It was the decline of the subscription library that forced publishers to sell books to individuals at a more reasonable price and eventually invent the idea of the paperback

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#76

Post by feanaro »

Simon_says wrote: post #9
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #3

Interesting that in the old linked discussion from 2013, someone claims that publishers can't complain, because they had a record year financially. I wonder how well they are doing now. My gut feeling is that publishers these days face problems not from privacy so much as from 1) the sheer glut of content, making it hard to stand out, and 2) shortening attention spans and people preferring to read snackable content o…

I bought one of the first Kindles and loaded it up with a hundred DRM-liberated ebooks and read it avidly. Since then, phones have gotten bigger screens with higher pixel density and longer battery life, and my Kindle now sits is a drawer unused. The best ebook reader is the one you have on you.

e-ink is still vastly superior for reading than any phone screen, IMO. The experience seems completely incomparable.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#77

Post by jhbadger »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #62
breck wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how to feel about it. Don't feel bad at all. Intellectual Monopoly laws are morally wrong (and I would argue counterproductive if the goal is progress of the arts and sciences and/or economic growth). I hope that when the generation that grew up with the web is making the laws we'll get rid of these abysmal systems. The author of the comment you referencing is wrong. Copying a book that has been releas…

But then we need a new system, for example governments could pay writers a salary to create, rather than have them rely on selling books.

That's how it worked in the Soviet Union. Official writers were paid by the government (there were of course unofficial writers passing their work via illegal self-published "samizdat" versions, and some writers lived in both worlds). The problem was the government wasn't too keen on publishing works critical of it.

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#79

Post by pjc50 »

leggomylibro wrote: post #74
dsabanin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should become the change you want to see in the world and stop charging for your work. I wonder how that will go.

A lot of people on this forum probably are pretty happy-go-lucky with their negotiating. The difference between $200k and $300k is a lot, but I see a lot of unattached young people not really caring. Ironically, it seems much smaller than the difference between $20k and $30k. But most artists don't have people breaking their door down to compete for their time. And anyways, coding is a creative profession; I'm sure t…

> The difference between $200k and $300k is a lot, but I see a lot of unattached young people not really caring.

In which context do you see that?

> ex post facto' rewards as a sort of corrupting influence on the creation of art

So ... Patronage only? Commissions only?

Re: Confessions of a Book Pirate (2010)

#80

Post by breck »

boksboksboks wrote: post #36
breck wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how to feel about it. Don't feel bad at all. Intellectual Monopoly laws are morally wrong (and I would argue counterproductive if the goal is progress of the arts and sciences and/or economic growth). I hope that when the generation that grew up with the web is making the laws we'll get rid of these abysmal systems. The author of the comment you referencing is wrong. Copying a book that has been releas…

So how would you better compensate writers for the product of their knowledge and labor? IP is simply the means of enforcing the value of books. If you deny it without proposing a viable alternative, you're denying the value of writing itself.

> So how would you better compensate writers for the product of their knowledge and labor?

It's a good question. I think there's a 2 phase answer. But first, it's important to figure out the numbers. And one thing that quickly becomes apparent is on the order of 99% of writers make $0 from IM laws. IM laws instead, regardless of intent, funnel almost the entirety of profits to 1% of holders.

So the question then becomes, how do you better compensate those 1%? And the answer is you don't. The 1%'s current compensation is artificially inflated, and the 99% is under compensated.

Right now IM laws create artificially high compensation for less meaningful contributions like a 500 page book or 50 page pdf in a publication like Nature, and undervalue more meaningful contributions like small additions to Wikipedia or commits to the Linux kernel. I would much rather have the top 1,000 compensated "authors" in the world never write again than I would have Wikipedia disappear.

I think we should 2 phase the transition away from IM laws. I don't think we should abolish overnight, as that would be very disruptive to the families of folks in the IM industry. I have no sympathy for IM lawyers and IM business folks, but I do think we should have a transition period where we perhaps switch patents from an Intellectual Monopoly system to an X-Prize style system, and perhaps then phase it out (or keep the X-Prize style system, if it seems to be effective). Then in phase 2 the progress of the arts and sciences will flourish so much, I'm not too sure if you need any sort of system to artificially inflate the value of intellectual contributions at all. Creativity of billions of people will be unleashed. For a single example, if I didn't have to worry about IM laws, I (or many other people) could build a viable alternative to Google search in a year. I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the economics of the world by making many more markets feasible. There are so many markets and opportunities now, that if you lowered the cost of product development (which eliminating IM laws would do), I could see an argument where it's feasible that everyone who desired could have a natural monopoly, because there would be so many markets to choose from.

> IP is simply the means of enforcing the value of books. If you deny it without proposing a viable alternative, you're denying the value of writing itself.

IM is one idea. There are plenty of alternatives. When a janitor cleans a room, do we then give that janitor the right to charge a royalty for every person who enters that room?

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