4 ms·

The Slow Death of the American Author

9 points by Jun8 14y ago

Jun8 14y ago
If you want to read a well-crafted polemic against efforts that try to reconcile digital access to books with authors interests, this I think, is a good example. It creates FUD by mentioning "stolen goods", stigmatizes academics that push for free access to information as "simply promoting their own careers over the livelihoods of other writers". Especially preposterous, was the claim that book piracy in Russia was to blame for the fact that "... in the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov, few Russians, let alone Westerners, can name a contemporary Russian author whose work regularly affects the national conversation."
- cafard 14y ago
  Indeed. Did Tolstoy have to live off his royalties?
panzagl 14y ago
Couldn't an author simply not sell rights to an overseas publisher? If there is no cheap overseas edition authorized, then there is no cheap overseas edition to be imported back to the US.
sabat 14y ago
But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. Therein lies the problem: antiquated business model. The publisher in its current form is a dinosaur. Certainly we need curation and editing, but not for this level of cost.
gwern 14y ago
> The pirates would be a limited menace were it not for search engines that point users to these rogue sites with no fear of legal consequence, thanks to a provision inserted into the 1998 copyright laws. A search for “Scott Turow free e-books” brought up 10 pirate sites out of the first 10 results on Yahoo, 8 of 8 on Bing and 6 of 10 on Google, with paid ads decorating the margins of all three pages. How many would actually give you a usable copy? If the top Google hits for piracy did what they said they did, I'd have a lot more downloaded books than I do now...
- GFischer 14y ago
  Probably several (of the top Google results) would result on an actual download... after a lot of redirects and malware installs. Edit: let's test it :) Search: scott turow ebook download 1st link - paid site (did not try) 2nd link - 1 redirect, ended up on a chinese site, donwloaded. PDF, opened perfectly. Less than one minute download. 3rd link - direct download The books were: Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, and El peso de la prueba – Scott Turow That's a hard barrier indeed. But the hardest is jumping over the hurdle that is legal distribution (and the awful royalty bargains the author mentions). I've desisted of buying some ebooks on Amazon due to unreasonable prices and/or delayed release dates. Case in point, A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan, I went credit card in hand to Amazon's site to buy it... but they're not selling it, only the paper version. I'd also pay for a Netflix ebook equivalent, probably more than I do for Netflix itself.

9 points by Jun8 14y ago

Jun8 14y ago

If you want to read a well-crafted polemic against efforts that try to reconcile digital access to books with authors interests, this I think, is a good example. It creates FUD by mentioning "stolen goods", stigmatizes academics that push for free access to information as "simply promoting their own careers over the livelihoods of other writers". Especially preposterous, was the claim that book piracy in Russia was to blame for the fact that "... in the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov, few Russians, let alone Westerners, can name a contemporary Russian author whose work regularly affects the national conversation."

cafard 14y ago
Indeed. Did Tolstoy have to live off his royalties?

panzagl 14y ago

Couldn't an author simply not sell rights to an overseas publisher? If there is no cheap overseas edition authorized, then there is no cheap overseas edition to be imported back to the US.

sabat 14y ago

But instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. Therein lies the problem: antiquated business model. The publisher in its current form is a dinosaur. Certainly we need curation and editing, but not for this level of cost.

gwern 14y ago

> The pirates would be a limited menace were it not for search engines that point users to these rogue sites with no fear of legal consequence, thanks to a provision inserted into the 1998 copyright laws. A search for “Scott Turow free e-books” brought up 10 pirate sites out of the first 10 results on Yahoo, 8 of 8 on Bing and 6 of 10 on Google, with paid ads decorating the margins of all three pages. How many would actually give you a usable copy? If the top Google hits for piracy did what they said they did, I'd have a lot more downloaded books than I do now...

GFischer 14y ago
Probably several (of the top Google results) would result on an actual download... after a lot of redirects and malware installs. Edit: let's test it :) Search: scott turow ebook download 1st link - paid site (did not try) 2nd link - 1 redirect, ended up on a chinese site, donwloaded. PDF, opened perfectly. Less than one minute download. 3rd link - direct download The books were: Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, and El peso de la prueba – Scott Turow That's a hard barrier indeed. But the hardest is jumping over the hurdle that is legal distribution (and the awful royalty bargains the author mentions). I've desisted of buying some ebooks on Amazon due to unreasonable prices and/or delayed release dates. Case in point, A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan, I went credit card in hand to Amazon's site to buy it... but they're not selling it, only the paper version. I'd also pay for a Netflix ebook equivalent, probably more than I do for Netflix itself.