Re: Re: Ebook Pirate

Jon Jermey made two very cogent points, although I'm not sure that his  
conclusions from them were ones I would draw.

> But once the book is in my possession then these are all sunk costs.
> Nobody makes any more money whether I read the copy of The Father  
> Brown
> Stories on my shelf or not. And none of these people make any money  
> if I
> buy a second-hand copy of Cat Among the Pigeons from a second-hand  
> book
> shop or Amazon.
>


Very true. And this has a huge impact upon any reasonable pricing  
model for reprints, reissues of public domain works, etc.

If there's no restriction on competition, public domain works aren't  
usually a very good bet for publishers. Unless they're astounding,  
they won't be made widely available. Even the classics are given very  
short publishing shrift.

If the books are still under copyright, and the files for the book  
block are still available, then the book itself can be profitably re- 
issued, even if the audience is pretty small.

Ebooks, of course, drop the barriers a small extra distance.  
Unfortunately, it's not as big a drop as most of the ebook community  
here seems to believe, IF you want to make the readership significant  
in size, and IF you want to continue to make reading a significant  
contender as a leisure activity.

In the end, all of these combine to make me conclude:
If you want to ensure limited readership for older works, you should  
shorten copyright drastically.

Counter-intuitive, and a direct contradiction of an article of faith  
in the anti-copyright community? Absolutely. But I do think I can  
support it.

> So all this only applies if you want people to produce NEW books. For
> the much larger number of books that have already been published and
> distributed -- especially when the people who worked on them are  
> dead or
> untraceable -- access to them should either be free or very cheap. And
> any attempts to restrict access to them should be treated as an  
> assault
> on free speech and sanctioned accordingly.




I agree that lower prices are the usual upshot, and usually should be  
(not a moral should, but an economic one -- everyone's best interests  
being better served that way).

I disagree that this is a free speech issue. If I understand the  
concept correctly, and I think I do, free speech is about whether each  
of us has the right to say and write what we want, and whether  
publishers have the right to publish it if they so choose. It's about  
preventing GOVERNMENTS from restricting OUTflows.

I don't think that when the owner of the rights to a work chooses to  
charge a price for that work (ANY price), you can call that a  
restriction of their speech.

Think about the legal logic here: if you can force someone to make a  
work available for some particular price, then why  couldn't you force  
them to make it available for free? And if you can force someone to do  
some particular kind of work for free, why couldn't you force them to  
do every type of work for free? Or alternatively, how would you keep  
the government from making laws forcing you to reveal all sorts of  
knowledge that you'd prefer not to reveal (rights to privacy and avoid  
self-incrimination are based upon the right to control your own speech/ 
use of your information and words, are they not?)

And the implications roll on from there.

In short, I think most of the folks agitating on this issue would  
truly HATE the unintended consequences, should they actually achieve  
their goals. On the other hand, I suspect that tyrants and dictators  
everywhere would be pleased as punch.

If you're experiencing a reflexive rejection of my points right now, I  
ask that you take a minute or three to sit back and consider them  
again. Remember, we're messing with a very old, and very, VERY complex  
social system that is deeply interconnected with a number of other  
very, VERY complex systems.

I'm in favor of making books more inexpensive, as are most senior and  
experienced book people. I LOVE the idea of ebooks and of spreading  
the reach and availability of material, and of allowing more and more  
authors access to readers, without the intervention of gatekeepers.  
Most book people do, although they're rather more aware of the likely  
rise in the prevalence of drek than most outsiders would be.

I'm also not getting on this bandwagon, despite its obvious appeal.




Marion Gropen
Gropen Associates, Inc.
By-The-Question Consulting,  Tools for Publishers, & Classes
www.GropenAssoc.com
Her blog: www.GropenAssoc.com/blog





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