4 ms·
How do physical books not depend on copyright? The author still needs to get paid, and printing is fairly cheap.
by reissbaker 5y ago
How do physical books not depend on copyright? The author still needs to get paid, and printing is fairly cheap.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoPhysical books are valuable. Some people just prefer them over ebooks. As physical items, making and distributing copies is non-trivial and costs money. Due to their scarce nature, it actually makes sense to sell them.
- reissbaker 5y agoRight, but without copyright, anyone can copy and reprint any book that gets written, and the original author doesn't get paid.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoAuthors should get paid for the act of authoring. Not for selling copies after the fact. It's the labor that's valuable, not the result.
- iggldiggl 5y agoWhile I understand what you're getting at, how do you determine the actual value of the author's labour in advance, though? Copyright allows you to speculatively publish a work and let that determination of how valuable your work actually was happen afterwards, by taking the number of people willing to pay for it as a proxy for your labour's value.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoI don't know. This is a problem society must eventually figure out. Perhaps crowdfunding or patronage is the answer? I just know that intellectual property needs to go. In many ways it's already gone, these publishers just need to let it go.
- iggldiggl 5y agoUnder a no-copyright model, people willing to pay for physical books isn't directly linked to publishers/printers still willing to pay the author, though.