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> I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month You're not "losing" anything, you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality. > The question is

• cercatrova 4y ago
  Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument regarding worth. Just because someone works hard doesn't mean it's a profitable endeavor. I worked hard at startups that failed, it doesn't mean the startup has to be worth anything.
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    The book market shows people DO buy books, just like OP said. Clearly their book was worth something. Just because people will take it for free instead doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid for it.
    • effie 4y ago
      Also, just because people will take it for free doesn’t mean they would have paid for it.
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument regarding worth The labor theory of value is obviously complete bunk, but it sticks around anyway because it's a central tenet of Marxism.
    • gjm11 4y ago
      I think that gets the causality the wrong way around. I've heard plenty of people express similar sentiments without (so far as I can tell) being Marxists. More likely: it sticks around as a tenet of Marxism because it's a thing many people find intuitively plausible. "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think. Is it really? I rolled a boulder up and down a hill all day, pay me. "Nobody asked you to do that and nothing productive was accomplished. Nobody will pay you for that." But I worked really hard! Labor creates value, therefore I am entitled to payment. Whether you're rolling a boulder or writing a book, your labor hasn't created value unless you've actually produced something other people subjectively believe to be valuable. The subjective theory of value is common sense. The labor theory of value is obvious bullshit. It might fool children but for an adult to believe it requires brainwashing.
        • cercatrova 4y ago
          > The subjective theory of value is common sense. This is also the crux of why I cannot understand how people follow LTV. It just doesn't make sense upon even the slightest introspection.
          • eutropia 4y ago
            Slightly introspect for me then, why doesn’t LVT make sense?
            • cercatrova 4y ago
              Read my parent comment. Labor does not equal value by how most people define it. If I can labor for a task that people don't find valuable, like rolling a rock uphill, that means people intuitively feel some sort of subjective theory of value that's not connected simply to how hard someone worked. Hence, LTV does not make sense and we must find a different theory of value. Now, you can disagree that capitalism is not such a theory, but you ought to be able to agree that LTV ain't it, chief.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • nateoearth 4y ago
    Did the startups fail because people were stealing intellectual property? (For example, by illegally obtaining trade secrets, such as proprietary source code.) Or did they fail because they were unable to create offerings that customers valued above the cost to produce them? Until the United States economy no longer recognizes intellectual property rights, this is a critical distinction, whether we're discussing books, music, or proprietary software and hardware designs.
    • cercatrova 4y ago
      I used startups as an example, what I'm really criticizing is the notion that simply working hard means something is valuable, which it's not. I could have just as easily used the example of rolling a boulder uphill. Don't extrapolate the a analogy onto the original book argument, they are not connected when I wrote it.
• weeksie 4y ago
  Of course the author is losing something, someone stole his intellectual property and distributed it for free. It's not your responsibility to put food onto someone's table, but it is your responsibility not to steal it. Immoral acts do not become moral because they are easy to commit. It’s amazing the lengths people go to justify self serving bullshit. The apologetics in this thread are no different than the ones made 20 years ago for stealing music and software. Indie software only escaped because the sass model made piracy hard. Music is in terrible shape and its only saving grace is that it’s also a performance medium. If piracy makes it so that it doesn’t make much sense to produce novels, it’s the world that’s poorer. Justifying that because it happens or because it’s easy is nothing more than the naturalistic fallacy.
  • hunter2_ 4y ago
    The parallel between SaaS and live music is pretty interesting. Seeing a play in a theater (as the un-pirate-able version of a movie) also fits in this category. Service instead of product, essentially. I'm struggling to extend the analogy to books, though. The mental image of a kindergarten teacher reading a book and holding it up for the class to see the illustrations is a bit weak... perhaps theater serves as the post-movie and post-book medium alike.
    • weeksie 4y ago
      Exactly. The form of the novel is tied to text and text is fundamentally east to distribute because it is information. The problem is structurally tough.
  • xigoi 4y ago
    If someone steals your food, you no longer have it. If someone “steals” your book, you still have it.
    • weeksie 4y ago
      begging the metaphor is one approach when attempting to defend an indefensible position
• sooyoo 4y ago
  I generally agree with this particular point, but not with the overall sentiment. Which is that this is the author's problem and he should just suck it up. It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution. Not necessarily by enforcing unenforceable rules from previous centuries. But we need something else that works. A society in which only those with too much time on their hands write books is an intellectually poor one. We need authors who spend full time on producing high quality books, be it on non-fictional educational topic or on fictional entertainment. No worlds-best-expert is going to sit down and spend years of their life compiling a well-written book on a subject, just as little as Tom Cruise is going to shoot the next Top Gun for free (and the rest of the production company as well). We need to find a way, otherwise education will be stuck with outdated material and 5min ad-ridden clips on youtube by non-experts. (No offense, there are lots of experts on youtube, but there is a lot of crap out there too, and a 5 min clip on quantum entanglement just can't compete with a proper book. Whoever disagrees with this has likely watched too many such clips and never consumed a good book.)
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    > It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution. That is a real problem, but copyright is not an attempt to solve that problem. Copyright is an attempt to limit the distribution of information throughout society, supposedly to make content creation more financially rewarding. Piracy, on the other hand, is an attempt to increase the distribution of information throughout society, and supposedly makes content creation less financially rewarding. The problem you describe is real, but neither copyright systems nor piracy (at least according to the popular naive descriptions I provided) are an attempt to solve it. They’re both just choices about whether the distribution of information throughout society or the financial rewards for content creation are more important.
• lossolo 4y ago
  > Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table? If someone wants to release his book for free he can do it, we have a law that protects those that do not. > Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information. He doesn't deny anything to anyone, as I said before if someones wants to write books for free he can do it and he can share it with everyone. You deny his right to get paid for his work.
  • effie 4y ago
    The law protects against somebody else making money. It is not very effective in making readers pay the author. > You deny his right to get paid for his work. I think he (and me) is saying there is no such right in general. There is only "copyright" - the right to distribute the copies, or sell the license. But there is no right to get paid.
• massinstall 4y ago
  > Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table? What a crappy comment. Sad that there are people whose only apparent ability is to hurt, destroy, and consume.
  • effie 4y ago
    Not at all. The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work. The buyer is responsible for paying the author. If the author can't hack it and get buyers(often the buyer in this sense is the distributor), then the author should find a different occupation.
    • massinstall 4y ago
      > The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work. What a convenient way to make oneself feel comfortable living a moral-free life. Like as if this changes anything for the end result that someone stole something, and someone else has to foot the bill for that. You’re arguing off the premise that „the distributor is big anyway, so stealing from them doesn’t hurt anyone”. And the premise that it won’t hurt the author. It appears worthy of consideration that there may be a lack of fantasy here on your part.
      • effie 4y ago
        Oh, the moral card. Morals are highly context-dependent and vary across the population and social classes. There is no consensus on the idea "reading books without paying for them is immoral". It may be - if the person reads all books by some author, can afford to pay, but never does, then it does smell like bad behaviour. But not everybody behaves like this. Most books I download and read are some scholarly or technical stuff, where I read maybe one or two pages that interest me and then never open the book again for a year. I could never get all the books from stone-walled library or buy them all. But fortunately I do not have to, they are all available in the Public Library called the Web, and using this is beneficial to me, and harmless to anybody else.
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality Guessing certain types of readers are more likely to pirate than others. The reality you're describing is one in which pirating readers have fewer books written for them. As someone who doesn't pirate books, I'm reluctantly fine with that. My authors will get compensated and write. Others' authors will find something else to do; they can make podcasts or whatever.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    And my authors will keep writing because they want to write. I will also keep donating them money but it's not enough for them to go full time.
    • Valakas_ 4y ago
      World 1: zero copyright infringement. Everyone pays. No one pirates. More people write books. (as will be more money in it) World 1.1 Pays your bills. Doesn't make you rich. More crappy books. More high quality books. World 1.2 Can make you rich. Many people will write purely for financial reasons. Some people will be doubly motivated - financial and professional success. They can focus solely on their area of interest, and creating content for it knowing they can also achieve financial success with it. More books written by companies. More crappy books. More high quality books. World 2: Not one person on earth pays. Every single book has to be for free. The fewest books produced. Hobbyists or retired people only. People will write for passion. Not necessarily the most qualified people. World 3: Somewhere in between (our world) In-between. Look at youtube which is close to world 1.2. There certainly is a TON of crappy content. However, there's also very high quality, professionally produced content in there. No financial incentive means few of those high quality ones would be there.
• davidgay 4y ago
  You are completely missing the point of this thread. Even if we morally agree with all your points, the claim is that less books will get written and that that's bad for all of us. To rebut this, you need to either argue that this won't happen, suggest an alternative incentive for books to get written, or maybe even disagree that this result is bad.
  • effie 4y ago
    Let's get real. Even in the era of Internet and easy copying, zillions of books are being made and sold for money, profitably. The number of books being printed has no end. This situation is harmful to society, because good quality books are hard to discover and check (in a bookstore, on a piracy site) because they are drowned in the pile of rubbish that is wasting our time. Making books less profitable would suppress the production and make the quality stand out. A net positive for humanity.