If youuuu can JUST tell-us-the-answer tooo THESE questions, I'll stop using my game show voice!
Exhausted but brain-racey.
So while I have you here:
I had been planning on buying a Nook on Friday, but I am both ill-informed and somewhat concerned about the ethics of eBooks and publishing.
From what I hear, authors do not receive adequate pay for their labor when you buy an eBook because publishers give them the same percentage of royalties, though the publisher's costs and risks are substantially less than if they publish a physical book.
Being, yknow, sensitive to writers, is there further complexity to the authors-royalties inequality than this equation? I would presume that authors are in a similar boat as screenwriters in that digital publishing is a more contemporary distribution model with less explicit legal precedent to support and protect labor. Is this a false assumption?
Is there further complexity in authors rights or control of distribution methods? or anything else potentially harmful to the labor component?
Will the impact of eBooks really raise the cost of paper publishing so significantly? in which case, aren't we headed to a situation where access to books is INCREDIBLY class-influenced??? I mean if you can't afford an eReader or the books themselves then... ?? I mean I suppose the cost of eReaders will go down at some point tho? and perhaps eBooks will commit to universal file format? potentially deferring a class-based accessibility impact?
opinions or idea-rs?
or in short: should I buy an eReader tomorrow + books or just buy MOAR books?
*sigh* as always, I am an incredibly neurotic consumer (and sekritly, also a neurotic producer) due to my uneasy relationship with Capitalism. And yes, I know the labor and resources to produce technological devices is incredibly problematic in a trillion ways, but my feminist-marxist anxieties are not the only organizing principle of my life-decision process. so yknow. dw+eljay. and computers. oh my brain tonight...
So while I have you here:
I had been planning on buying a Nook on Friday, but I am both ill-informed and somewhat concerned about the ethics of eBooks and publishing.
From what I hear, authors do not receive adequate pay for their labor when you buy an eBook because publishers give them the same percentage of royalties, though the publisher's costs and risks are substantially less than if they publish a physical book.
Being, yknow, sensitive to writers, is there further complexity to the authors-royalties inequality than this equation? I would presume that authors are in a similar boat as screenwriters in that digital publishing is a more contemporary distribution model with less explicit legal precedent to support and protect labor. Is this a false assumption?
Is there further complexity in authors rights or control of distribution methods? or anything else potentially harmful to the labor component?
Will the impact of eBooks really raise the cost of paper publishing so significantly? in which case, aren't we headed to a situation where access to books is INCREDIBLY class-influenced??? I mean if you can't afford an eReader or the books themselves then... ?? I mean I suppose the cost of eReaders will go down at some point tho? and perhaps eBooks will commit to universal file format? potentially deferring a class-based accessibility impact?
opinions or idea-rs?
or in short: should I buy an eReader tomorrow + books or just buy MOAR books?
*sigh* as always, I am an incredibly neurotic consumer (and sekritly, also a neurotic producer) due to my uneasy relationship with Capitalism. And yes, I know the labor and resources to produce technological devices is incredibly problematic in a trillion ways, but my feminist-marxist anxieties are not the only organizing principle of my life-decision process. so yknow. dw+eljay. and computers. oh my brain tonight...