Entry tags:

linkspam

So, as you may have noticed, there have been a ton of posts about illegal book downloads lately. They have all been so good! And I wanted to link to them! But then there were SO MANY that I wanted to link to that I went into avoidance mode. WHILE STILL BOOKMARKING MORE TO LINK. ;o;

Anyway, today I am determined to get this done. So here are a bunch of excellent posts about "piracy", but I am not putting quotes because I don't have the time to search through for just the right one. They are all good posts and should be read!

qian: ebook piracy
colorblue: this is not a post about yoga!
epershand: Established: I am an asshole
vito_excalibur: FOG, theft, inevitability
rhivolution: We're really bad eggs.
marina: Untitled
wistfuljane: *wry twist*
qian: Control and connection
deepad: The politics of discussing illegal file-sharing
snarp: On Digital Piracy, By Way Of My Confession That I Am A Deranged Criminal.
mirabella: Untitled
ebooks: WWJSD: What Would Jack Sparrow Do?
sholio: Musing on book piracy
starlady: Some links on illegal file-sharing and IPR
marina: I swear this was going to be a cheerful post; apparently I'm not done talking about this

I don't know that I really have my thoughts in order to make a coherent post of my own, but here are a couple things just quickly:

1. Illegal downloads are NO DIFFERENT from borrowing from a friend or getting a used copy off Amazon or BookMooch. (I would add taking it out from the library, but I am not sure exactly how libraries work in that regard, so I will leave them out of the discussion.) It feels different because it's new, but it's not. Really. I read fifty books last year and ONE of them was bought new. The rest, the author never saw a penny for because they were all used copies. I am not a better person because I got them from BookMooch rather than downloading.

2. I have little sympathy for people who apparently quit their jobs and expected to be able to earn a living entirely from writing books. That seems pretty fantasyland to me, you know? I thought everyone knew that the chances of being JKR are pretty slim and writing should not be your only source of income?

3. A lot of what I'm seeing from authors is the insistence that if you can't afford the book or can't access it through more traditional means, you don't deserve to read it. This comes off like spitefully punishing readers and I just don't understand it. My thinking is that if people can pay, great, but if they can't, what is the use in telling them not to read it?


And here is something relevant to this discussion: a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History Of The United States that you can read online. The people who run the website have received C&Ds, but believe that this is a book that people need to read and thus that it should be available for free. (I managed to get a copy from BookMooch myself, and it has been high on my to-read list, but I think I will bump it up even higher.)