Book piracy: two perspectives

[charmingmonstrs]

The Millions interviews a book pirate:
Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die I dont know to what

Comments

[dunderbug]

This gets around to my basic theory that selfishness is the core of human psychology

I would like to hear this rant. As I think selfishness sometimes gets a bad rap, but hey if people weren't selfish sometimes we wouldn't do things like, pursue our own creative interests. But I think that's an 'over tea' conversation. Or maybe over booze. :)

As for Book Piracy. It sure ain't new. The interwebs has been torrenting tech manuals for years as pdfs.

I find piracy a hard argument to take sides on. For starters, it ticks me off when artists get ripped off, and there should be a line somewhere. But where? Downloading is not going away, and we've all used it in some way or another so I feel like arguing the right or wrong of it is a moot point. People will download the media they want, and pay for other media they want.

I do think talking about changing the methods of distribution is the path to go down though, as I feel that will bring at least some kind of balance to the force, sort of? I also kind of think people would pay more for digital downloads if the download prices were comparative to the delivery method, at least for books which I find still pretty inflated in the download world price wise. If you price a tangible object at $17…I'm not going to shell $17 for a digital file.

And maybe there's the crux, file formats don't feel real yet. Maybe when they do, the value bar will reset itself.

But eh, its speculation…after all. All I do is work with in-tangible items.