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Copyright Infringement of Books

Posted by kdawson on Tue May 12, 2009 04:58 PM
from the all-just-bits dept.
Maximum Prophet recommends a NY Times piece on the growing phenomenon of unauthorized digital versions of copyrighted books showing up online. The problem has been growing exponentially, fed in part by the popularity of reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone. The article features the odd photographic juxtaposition of Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin, who take opposite views on electronic editions, authorized or not. Ms. Le Guin: "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?" Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity." "Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel 'Little Brother' spent seven weeks on the New York Times children's chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers."
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  • by Master of Transhuman (597628) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:04PM (#27929039) Homepage

    Go to Usenet, get just about everything you could want. Build up a personal library of hundreds of texts that would match a (small town) library.

    The book publishing industry will go the way of the music and movie industries, just a bit slower since reading text on a monitor is still not quite as easy as a real book.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:08PM (#27929097)

      FTFA:

      "The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys," Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. "And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer."

      Parent poster:

      Go to Usenet

      Sounds about right.

    • by Aranykai (1053846) <slgonser&gmail,com> on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:31PM (#27929431)

      The book publishing industry will go the way of the music and movie industries, just a bit slower since reading text on a monitor is still not quite as easy as a real book.

      You mean like how the US Music industry is posting profit growth of 4% annually over the last three years? Or perhaps you meant the Movie industry with its 3rd year of growth?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Books have been roughly the same for the last 200 years, since the printing press revolutionized how books were copied. Music, on the other hand, has changed maybe once a decade since audio equipment and the radio were invented and became widespread.

        I think that people who read books, a small market to be sure, is made up mostly of people who go to a library to find out if they like something and, if the book is good enough, then go to Amazon or Borders or B&N and buy the book. I know that's what I
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Mr2001 (90979)

          Can you recommend one that doesn't cost more than 300 books?

          Given that the GGP's comment was about how Usenet allowed him to collect hundreds of books for free...

          No.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          I was with you until you've got there:

          ... Does the colour of the paper and it's smell tell me how long ago it was published? Can I look at the spine of an e-book and know the reading habits of the previous owner?/ ...

          You know, with a few minor replacements, your post could just as well end in "... which is why we will always have phonographs".

          As for the relevant parts of it (folding, marginal notes etc), it's either already here, or around the corner (i.e. working prototypes have been demonstrated already).

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by yali (209015)

        Actually, it'd be great if the current laws were consistent with the 200-year-old stuff: [cornell.edu]

        To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

        Congress has gone way beyond the Constitutional intent or meaning, and the Supreme Court has unfortunately upheld them on it. That is why copyright has so many problems. Copyright terms have been extended to make money for business interests, not to su

        • by Jurily (900488) <jurily@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday May 12 2009, @06:41PM (#27930389)

          Fair use? We're using computers, which do copying for even the most trivial operations, so we have to throw the idea out and look for something else.

          Which is exactly why we need to extend the concept to computers en masse. The current laws are impossible to enforce without a police state. Which one would you want?

          One of the general problems is that as soon as a computer is introduced to a subject area, all precedent is forgotten, chants of "That's different!" are heard repeatedly, and we humans must relearn every social lesson that we so laboriously worked out over the centuries.

          Yes, but that's not a bad thing. The lessons our ancestors learned are different from today's. Our ancestors didn't have instant and truly anonymous speech from 10000 miles away in a country with no extradition treaty. Our ancestors didn't have access to so many types of entertainment competing for their attention span it's humanly impossible to even know about them all. We need to learn our own lessons about the Internet, because we're the ones who experience it.

          If you lean too much on tradition you'll end up like Hungary in WW2: a Kingdom without a king, lead by an admiral without a fleet, in a country without a coastline, fighting against enemies we have no problems with, with countries as our ally we do have problems with.

        • by Jurily (900488) <jurily@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday May 12 2009, @07:01PM (#27930677)

          I still don't understand the "Because it can be done easily is is my right to do it" attitude of the pirate defenders.

          Easy. You're criminalizing a big chunk of society, who are actually decent people. Because it's so easy to do it, there's no moral backlash, no higher ethics forbidding it like murder. How could it be illegal to use the internet you paid for, after all?

          Do you really want to ruin university students' (read: theoretically the best and brightest of their age range with the most promising future ahead of them) lives because they downloaded some music to go with the exam material? Do you really want the police state needed to enforce these laws today?

          Copyright was invented to protect those who owned a printing machine from each other. You don't think those rules should apply today, do you? And if you're worried about the author, ask them next time how much of the retail price they get to keep. They'd be better off if you sent one of them $100 and pirated for the rest of your life.

          And if you're still brainwashed enough to defend copyright, google up all the ancient Greek works that were destroyed, and only their copies survived.

          • by MrHanky (141717) on Wednesday May 13 2009, @04:30AM (#27934967) Homepage Journal

            This is 1) a logical fallacy called argumentum ad populum: something is right because people do it; 2) a logical fallacy called a strawman (the Coward never proposed solving the piracy problem with police state measures); 3) a logical fallacy called a non sequitur (advocacy of a police state doesn't follow from the statement that piracy is wrong); 4) an incomplete "analysis" of the reason for copyright; Score: 5, interesting on Slashdot.

            Congratulations.

          • by ErkDemon (1202789) on Wednesday May 13 2009, @12:21PM (#27940223) Homepage
            No, copyright was invented (along with some other IP rights) to persuade authors and inventors that it was okay to allow other people to see their stuff, without being paranoid that the first person who saw it would rip them off and steal all their work.

            What was happening before IP rights came along was that originators would keep what they'd created secret until they were in a position to get a sponsorship deal up-front, or to make a lot of money very fast through some other means (like having a printing-and-distribution deal whereby they could flood the market with their own official product before the rip-off merchants had a chance to get their copies ready). In the case of classical composers, they'd keep their work secret until they got a commission for a big public performance, at which point they'd dig something suitable out of their chest of part-finished manuscripts, cut it or build it up to the desired length, polish it and hand it over. Some people marvel at how some great works of classical music were supposedly written from scratch in a few weeks, to order - and of course, they weren't ... some of those works had perhaps been tinkered with for years, but were never completed and performed until the composer's patron asked for something new for a high-profile performance ... because that was the only way that the composer could make money from their work. Until that point your "protection" was keeping kept your stuff secret until the last possible moment. If the chance to cash in never came along, then you'd hang onto the thing to keep it safe, and perhaps end up taking it to your grave.

            The point of introducing IP was that you could now show your stuff to other people, and allow society to see and evaluate your work, and in return for sharing, society would go some way to protecting your right to profit from what you'd done. It meant that you didn't have ten companies all developing the same device in secret, with none of them bringing it to market until the time was right for "quick-burst" profits. You weren't properly protected if you didn't share, but once you'd lodged a public patent or published a book, everyone knew that the thing was yours, and society would reward you for sharing by trying to stop you being badly ripped off.

            That was the deal. Share and be protected.

            (Before someone else mentions it, yes, I appreciate that the US phenomenon of submarine patents [wikipedia.org] violated that deal ... and that's why those patents should have been declared void, on the grounds that the filers were negligent in not upholding their end of the deal.)

            And if you're still brainwashed enough to defend copyright, google up all the ancient Greek works that were destroyed, and only their copies survived.

            "Libraries of record" should have exemption from any copyright rules that prevent them from making copies of published works for archival and/or preservation purposes. I think that the Library of Congress already has such an exemption, and last time I looked the British Library were campaigning hard to get UK law updated to provide a similar exemption (which should have been there but seemed to have been missed due to an oversight). It's not difficult to write clauses into copyright law that makes "preservation of works" a priority, and law-makers tend to be sympathetic to the argument when its put to them. The need to preserve works really isn't a sensible argument for scrapping the whole copyright system.

            If the Library of Congress wants to scan your book and deposit microfiche and electronic copies of it in nuclear bunkers scattered around the US to preserve it in case of social upheaval, my understanding is that that's probably absolutely fine under US copyright law, without their having to ask anybody's permission or pay anyone any money. No problem.

  • by mgabrys_sf (951552) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:07PM (#27929075) Journal

    re:"Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity.""

    I think his real problem is he can't write. Might explain the obscurity.

    • Re:the real issue (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jedidiah (1196) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:16PM (#27929187) Homepage

      Nope. There are genre giants that end up making less than the waiter at the local Dennys.

      This all boils down to the fact that they are relatively obscure and service a
      relatively small market. Furthermore, their publisher eats up most of the gross
      revenue of what actually gets sold and distribution costs need to be recovered.

      Unless you are Stephen King, a few pirates will probably benefit you in the end.

      You're probably obscure enough that pirates really can't do any harm.

  • by blahplusplus (757119) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:07PM (#27929081)

    ... there is really so much competition for peoples time these days it's little wonder companies like to blame lack of sales on piracy.

    I'd really like someone to add up all the hours it would take to experience x's book or y's product and they'd soon begin to realize it would take someone an ENTIRE LIFETIME not even to get through a fraction of what is out there.

    I usually only buy books that I think are worth something over the long term. People have way too many options today to fill their time. Also with the advent of the net discussing and sharing insights, any book that is published quickly becomes out-dated.

    One thing I hope electronic books allow is real-time updates to books so that they can stay fresh, with a wikipedia like revision system that tracks version and revision history (for those that need it).

    Personally electronic books when done right (when the software gets there) will allow copying and pasting a whole bunch of different things that you can't do with a real book. Both will have their place I think.

  • Yeah. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fear the Clam (230933) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:08PM (#27929099)

    Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity."

    There, there, Cory. People are paying attention to you now. It's okay.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:11PM (#27929125)

    Back in his day they had this distributed network of his plays called Uyznettee. Only Uyznettee used horses as the transport. They would stick a small cannonball up the horse's backside for a "one." An empty horse was a "zero." Occasional errors occurred if a horse voided before the transfer was complete, but a parity horse took care of that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Tx (96709)

      They would stick a small cannonball up the horse's backside for a "one." An empty horse was a "zero."

      Up the backside, huh? I guess that should be called "rear-to-rear sharing" then.

  • Why... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Darkness404 (1287218) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:17PM (#27929207)
    Why do artists always keep complaining? Write good books, make good music, make interesting movies, and the money will flow in, piracy or no piracy. Write crappy books, make more crappy pop songs, and make boring as heck movies and your income will dry up. Piracy or no piracy.
    • Re:Why... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Raffaello (230287) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:34PM (#27929469)

      Write good books, make good music, make interesting movies, and the money will flow in.

      Why? Because you think it would be nice if the world worked this way?

      The reality for many writers is that income streams are small and intermittent, and having one's work freely available on line for zero cost really does reduce income.

      • Re:Why... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Darkness404 (1287218) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:41PM (#27929591)
        Right, because the most pirated artists are the poorest. I don't know how Metallica can pay the rent if another person torrents Death Magnetic. Most of the poor artists that actually can suffer from piracy are obscure so people don't pirate them.

        Looking at The Pirate Bay's top 100 of audiobooks (because the e-books seem to be geek-only and aren't respective of the entire population, unless a crapload of people are annoyed with Vista and enjoy building the perfect PC) you find:

        Harry Potter, self help books or language learning books from popular authors, dead authors (some recently deceased like Robert Jordan, others dead for years such as George Orwell), the Twilight Saga, etc. In other words mostly well-known books, or books in which pirating is not harming the authors (unless you get royalties in the afterlife).
  • by Peter Cooper (660482) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:18PM (#27929213) Journal

    I'm a two-bit, small time computer book author with just one book to my name so far. I love seeing my book get pirated. It's sold reasonably well for its niche (approaching 10,000 copies) but for the second edition I pleaded with my publisher to allow the e-book version to be free. Of the, say, 10,000 copies sold, only a couple hundred have been of the e-book edition, and I'm convinced that the wider exposure a free e-book would gather would result in increased print sales. When Seth Godin gave away the free PDF of his Ideavirus book, it led to me buying his various other books in print throughout the years. Doctorow is right that obscurity is a bigger hurdle than piracy, but I'm pretty convinced that even big name authors could benefit from extended reach thanks to freely distributed content.

    My argument rests on people preferring paper to e-books, and I think they do. I sure do. Sadly, big name publishers tend to disagree, despite a number of convincing social media experiments, but over time perhaps change will happen.

  • by moniker127 (1290002) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:20PM (#27929239)
    Honestly, lets all give up making unauthorized copies of books. I mean, when you do that, its almost like distributing them in a fully public medium, for free- readers don't have to pay a DIME.

    Well, that, sir, is the worst form of terrorism. Certainly neither I nor our great US&A government could support an endeavor of such despicable intent.

    Besides, you cant beat the independent authors industry- they're too powerful.
  • by TheWoozle (984500) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:24PM (#27929301)

    From TFA: "Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file. What's more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version."

    I spent a few minutes looking for a legitimate, for-sale e-book version of The Left Hand of Darkness; there isn't one.

    So the publishing companies are simply repeating the mistake of the record labels: being slow to release legitimate downloadable versions of their product while bemoaning the demand for a product they refuse to produce.

    Cry me a river...

  • Dear Ms. Le Guin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by commodore64_love (1445365) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:26PM (#27929335)

    "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?"

    The People. The ultimate holders of authority. If they decide to amend the Constitution to abolish your and everyone else's copyright, they can, so I suggest you show them some respect.

    Also dear author, it's a *privilege* not to have your books copied, not a natural right. Learn the difference. You can control your property and lock your book inside a vault where none can see it, but you have no right to control other people's property or how it is used.

    And finally that privilege is a *temporary* privilege. Eventually all your works will fall into public domain, just like Mark Twain's works. The arts are meant to be free, not locked-up forever.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      She should also go and yell at Paperbackswap.com, used book stores and libraries. The heathens are violating your copyright because not one is paying you for your work.
      • by Morgaine (4316) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @09:19PM (#27932319)

        The book that I wrote is mine. It's content belongs to me. Period.

        You're quite wrong. The book belonged to you (period), until the moment when you published it. Note the root of that word, pub- , it's very important.

        From that moment in time, the book became part of public culture, progressively less and less yours and more and more a part of the public mind as its community of readers expands. And eventually, when it passes into the public domain, the work will not be yours at all, despite the fact that you will still be its author. See, there's a difference.

        For a writer, you're curiously unaware of the relationship between a written work and the minds of readers. A book isn't the paper it's written on, but the words and ideas contained within. When a person reads your book, those words and ideas are inevitably donated to that reader, every last bit of them (the paper is irrelevant). Dwell on that a while, because you don't appear to have absorbed the implications.

        For each person who reads your work, your "codified super insightful knowledge" (as you put it) becomes ever less exclusive, and if you are really popular then your exclusive hold over that knowledge drops close to nil: your work has become part of popular culture, and gained a momentum of its own. You are then no longer its owner but merely its author, and your earnings from it will be far more a product of the work's cultural significance than of your publisher's marketting. It will no longer be a "product", but an element of culture with earnings as a side effect.

        You might wish to reflect a little on this essay from Baen: http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com] . As long as you are at war with your readers, I predict a future of hand-wringing and unhappiness.

  • by serutan (259622) <doug@@@geekazon...com> on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:26PM (#27929341) Homepage

    There seems to be an inherent gut-level bias against the notion of somebody getting something for nothing. Even if it turns out good in the end. No matter how many people testify that releasing free copies of their work has actually increased their net income, people like Ms. LeGuin can't get away from, "Mine! Mine! Let go!"

  • Come on Stephen, your books are pretty much the equivalent.

  • Baen Free Library (Score:4, Informative)

    by mrmeval (662166) <mrmeval AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:48PM (#27929685)

    http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com]

    There are some pretty big name authors here as well as new authors who are trying to make it. You can read the dissertation by that commie Eric Flint about "Online Piracy".

    Baen Publishing is noted for including a CD with some hardback novels that has free novels in it. Surprisingly enough they've not cried foul when digital editions of those CD's have ended up online.

    http://www.webscription.net/p-162-freehold.aspx [webscription.net] You can read a good friends book here.

  • by Eil (82413) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @06:29PM (#27930215) Homepage Journal

    Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. "If you put your hand in my pocket, you'll drag back six inches of bloody stump," he said.

    He seems like a reasonable guy.

  • by bcrowell (177657) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @06:36PM (#27930297) Homepage

    First off, the events they're talking about in the NY Times article actually came to a head in September 2007. It looks like a reporter dusted off some old notes simply because the Kindle is starting to get a lot of press, so it seems relevant now. The article doesn't really depict clearly what the controversy was about.

    There's a guy named Andrew Burt, who has published a little science fiction, and had gotten elected to a middle-level position in the Science Fiction Writers of America. He noticed that scribd.com had a whole bunch of copyright-violating scans of books. He did an automated search of scribd's catalog, and based on that search, and without much consultation with anyone, he sent scribd a slew of what appeared to be DMCA takedown notices. The trouble was that he wasn't very careful, and, e.g., he got them to delete some fiction by Cory Doctorow, who actually wanted it on scribd as a form of publicity. IIRC, DMCA takedown notices are also supposed to be sent by copyright owners, and signed under penalty of perjury, but Burt's notices were sent without consulting the copyright holders, and were factually inaccurate in many cases; I think he ended up claiming that they weren't DMCA notices, but scribd apparently thought they were. Doctorow got very angry, and publicized his anger on his web site boingboing. Doctorow also published a very short piece by Ursula LeGuin on boingboing, without her permission, which made her furious. Burt ran for president of SFWA after this, and lost. The whole thing exposed a generational divide between older and younger SF authors. The older ones typically were suspicious of the internet, and saw it as a threat. The younger ones typically saw it as a way to publicize themselves. An old-timer named Howard Hendrix compared authors who gave their work away online for free to scabs, resulting in an ironic response called International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day [wikipedia.org]. Here are some representative opinions on the whole thing:

    1. http://www.aburt.com/sfwa-cc.ht [aburt.com]
    2. http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/30/science-fiction-writ-1.html [boingboing.net]
    3. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/11/sfwa_attempts_to_commit_public.html [antipope.org]

    So first off, this isn't really a controversy about whether copyright should exist. The positions of all the different parties are quite similar on that issue. Scribd, Burt, Doctorow, LeGuin, and Hendrix are all pretty much in agreement that it's a bad thing to violate authors' copyrights. What they disagree on is mainly whether the internet presents more of a threat, or more of an opportunity.

    Another thing to understand about this is that scribd is just a tool, in the same way that bittorrent is just a tool. I've posted some of my own nonfiction on scribd, simply on the theory that publicizing my work is always a good thing. However, just as The Pirate Bay has an extremely heavy presence of pointers to copyright-violating torrents, scribd also has a huge amount of copyright-violating stuff. Maybe the percentage is lower, but it's still a huge presence there. It's the classic situation where the web site is willing to devote x amount of effort to policing itself, but various people would like them to devote 10x (similar to Craigslist and prostitution).

  • by jtownatpunk.net (245670) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @06:43PM (#27930409)

    I have absolutely no ethical qualms about downloading the electronic version of a book I've purchased in dead-tree form. I paid for the words presented in text form. Whether I read them on paper or a screen, it's the same performance of the same work. It's like ripping my own CDs so I can load them on my MP3 player except someone else did the ripping. In fact, I don't even have many of my physical books or CDs on hand. They're tucked away in boxes at a relative's house. (A relative who has a lot more storage space than me.) I ripped all my CDs years ago and haven't touched the physical media since. If I want to read a book I own (and I know which books I own), I download a pdf, prc, rtf, doc, html, etc. I haven't resold or disposed of any of them so, legally, I still own a copy and nobody's using the physical copy at the same time that I'm using the electronic copy. But I'm sure what I'm doing would piss off some copyright holders.

    If I owned a kindle, you can bet I'd use my ethical loophole to bypass their $10/title charge for most books. I'd rather pay $5-7 for a paperback and download a "pirated" electronic version. Heck, even if they only charged $2/title for ebooks, I'd still download a pirated version after paying my $2 so I could be sure I'd have access to the product after the DRM screws me 5-10 years down the road.

    Copyright holders and IP distributors need to clue in to the fact that reproducing information is cheap and easy. They can't legislate away that reality. Produce a quality product at a reasonable price and it'll sell. Try to charge more than people feel an easily-reproduced product is worth and they'll steal it or ignore it. Refuse to provide the product in a form that they want or make the process too cumbersome and they'll bypass you entirely.

  • Google settlement (Score:3, Informative)

    by InklingBooks (687623) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @06:47PM (#27930471)
    For those who're following the debate about the Google settlement, I'm documents related to the case along with links to useful sources of information, particularly news about the settlement from Europe.

    http://inklingbooks.com/googlesettlement/googlesettlement.html [inklingbooks.com]

  • Kind of interesting that someone who had a bestseller a year ago is more open to the idea of digital publishing than an author that hasn't written much worthwhile since the 70's. Don't get me wrong Le Guin is far more prolific writer but if part of the crowd that grew up without the technology we have today and have refused to embrace the times.

    The irony will be that as online publishing and ebooks become more and more prevalent the technology frightened authors like Le Guin will disappear into obscurity by their own efforts to protect themselves and you can bet they will whine about that too.

    If things continue as they are a huge gap of world literature from the "copyright reform" era will simply vanish.

    I do think its rather sad that in a genre like science fiction and fantasy there are people without the foresight to see a day when dead tree's will no longer be practical reading material.

    • Re:HA! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:32PM (#27929443) Journal
      It might rather suggest that the optimal strategies for authors differ, depending on their market, level of exposure, and similar factors.

      If you are a well-established author, as LeGuin is, whose works are a standard recommendation for young adult fiction(one of the largest book markets out there), the value of additional exposure is likely to be lower than the cost of would-be-buyers downloading instead.

      If you are not a well-established author, or are well established only in a comparatively narrow niche, as Doctorow is, the value of additional exposure might well be substantially higher than any loss in sales.

      Another difference might be with target market. Someone trying to appeal to children or teens, a tech-savvy but fairly cost sensitive(and often credit-cardless) demographic, might worry more about piracy, since if downloading or copying from a friend at school is easier than whining for mom's credit card, they lose a sale. Someone trying to appeal to twenty-something techies with online buying power might not face the same hurdles.

      Now, it could simply be the case, as you suggest, that one author is right and the other is wrong; but it is, I think, reasonable to suspect that authors in different places might have different optimal strategies.
      • Re:HA! (Score:5, Funny)

        by Aardpig (622459) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:15PM (#27929175)
        A writer of trite, wanky fantasy who gets extremely litigious when someone borrows from her work as much as she borrows from others.
        • Re:HA! (Score:5, Informative)

          by Aardpig (622459) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @06:19PM (#27930093)
          Arsefuckers, I got her confused in my mind with Anne McCaffrey. LeGuin is actually really rather good -- The Left Hand of Darkness is a masterpiece...
          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by lessthan (977374)
            Ever notice in Anne McCaffrey work, that often the twenty-something woman ends up with the 50-60 year old man? Creepy.
        • Re:HA! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by retchdog (1319261) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:26PM (#27929329) Journal

          I'm not a big fan of either one, but there's just no comparison between the two. Le Guin's works just have incomparably more depth and experience behind them. She's won two Hugos, and also managed to not only finish undergrad, but earned an ivy league Ph.D. in anthropology as well... as opposed to her "competition". (Please, don't bother "pointing out" that a Ph.D. outside of the hard sciences is worthless. It's not. Heinlein wouldn't dedicate a novel to a soft-minded pseudo-thinker...)

          Doctorow is a small-fry gimmick writer compared to le Guin, and he knows it. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se. Doctorow's ideas and attitude are important; as they said about McLuhan, "even if he's wrong, it matters." But purely on authorial merit... please.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by _Sprocket_ (42527)

            I'm not a big fan of either one, but there's just no comparison between the two. Le Guin's works just have incomparably more depth and experience behind them.

            I wouldn't be surprised. I like Doctrow's work. However, it's more due to the subject matter and general concepts than the work itself. There are plenty of times I've felt something Doctrow wrote was more like story notes than finished story. But hey - still like his stuff. And I know who he is. ;)

    • by chromatic (9471) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:30PM (#27929405) Homepage

      What exactly is the value add of the publishers, distributors, and retailers?

      For distributors and retailers, somewhere around 50% of the cover price, less any discount they offer.

      For publishers... the value of a good editor is difficult to estimate. The same goes for a copyeditor and indexer.

      As for the rest, I calculated that my publisher earned seven times as much as I did from my previous two books. This is after taking out the per-unit cost. Given that there was little editorial support, little marketing support, and production was a fiasco of heroics, confusion, and impossible deadlines, I'm not sure that said publisher provided seven times as much value as I did.

      I'm not going to work with that publisher again. Now I have my own publishing company instead.

    • Re:Maxim (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wampus (1932) on Tuesday May 12 2009, @05:42PM (#27929611)

      You spell poorly and have low standards for material to look at while touching yourself, but you are NOT a troll.