Re: NY Times Ethicist Condones Ripping Off E-books

joseph harris wrote:
>
> Come on Jon, there is no way a bookshop can offer such a selection. Many of the older books can be ordered. But whether they are available or not is a matter of business, not of spite from publishers or creators.
>   
Welcome to the vicious circle: 'we don't make older books available 
because people won't buy them >> we don't buy older books because 
they're not available'. A paperback book isn't that much bigger than a 
CD: if a bookshop was genuinely devoted to quality rather than turnover 
they could easily keep a range of good older works in stock. After all, 
second-hand bookshops do it all the time.
> And I doubt you can find much i nthe way of old recordings i nrecord shops. Revival pieces are newly minted, and the 1721 piece, if really there, will be from a recent recording. Again you can order things if they are still in stock at the publishers or distributors.
>   
This has already been responded to.
> As to accusing publishers and booksellers of 'forcing untried' new products on unsuspecting customers... New book titles in the US alone are in the hundreds of thousands. No shop can stock all of one year's titles, let alone back to the year dot. And do you want decent books, or all the truly untried and unfiltered. This is already becoming a massive problem with ebooks, and they have hardly taken off yet.
>   
But this is exactly what eBook distributors CAN do. Storage space and 
management issues are negligible, and if the stuff they want is there 
the public will find it soon enough: they will even build their own 
tagging paths to make it easier for others.

> As to the rather funny idea of 'untried'; those are the living culture. All famous and liked authors started 'untried'. You are suggesting a full stop to new creation. Is that what you mean?
>   
I make an exception for non-fiction; but if all today's novelists, poets 
and playwrights stopped writing forever I wouldn't lose a moment's sleep 
over it. Since 99% of all writing is rubbish, why don't we embrace the 
stuff that's stood the test of time? Because it's not available any 
more, that's why. How many 'famous and liked' authors from, say, 1983 
can you find in a typical bookshop today?

Jon.


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