wait, you're saying i can download groceries for free?pic.twitter.com/GxMqHzvbDP
Mad genius, comedian, actor, and freelance voiceover artist broadcasting from the distant shores of Lake Erie (he/him)
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wait, you're saying i can download groceries for free?pic.twitter.com/GxMqHzvbDP
a turnip or a physical book is a finite resource, it's duplication requires materials and labour which must be paid for. a .pdf file doesn't have these limitations. it can be duplicated infinitely, at a cost immeasurably small. if your business model is obsoleted, get a new one
News flash: wood pulp and printers are cheap—the cost of a physical book block is around 10% of the retail price of a book. 90% of the costs are in writing, editing, typesetting, proofreading—exactly the same whether the book is a PDF or a lump of paper.
so you're pretending you don't know the difference between a one time cost (writing and editing it) and the costs of reproducing and distributing physical duplicates?
It's a compensation model meant to spread the payment for that one time cost among the many people who benefit from it Allowing unrestricted access creates a free rider problem where those one time costs never get paid and the product never comes into existence
Having been on the other side of the debate, in hindsight it's very tiresome pretending not to know how this works for the one thing you care about even though it's applies in many, many situations It's the whole "Why do my taxes pay for a road I don't drive on" thing
People love to suggest that musicians stop charging money for records and instead make their money from live shows but by this logic they can't charge for live shows either After all, the cost of a show doesn't change based on how many people are physically in the audience
The cost of having the show is already sunk, right, now that they're already performing why shouldn't I be allowed to just sneak in to watch for free, it doesn't take anything from them materially
The big difference here is that musicians benefit directly from the show, whereas record companies (and book publishers) gobble up the vast majority of the profits from a record (or book). Shows are also easy to gatekeep. It's easily possible to prevent people from gatecrashing.
This is not really true, especially of book publishing (@cstross has posted repeatedly debunking the idea that his publishers take a particularly huge chunk of the list price of his books)
The idea that "All the profits go to useless middlemen" is a pernicious floating concept that people latch onto because it makes stealing easier to justify But it's usually a very ill-informed and exaggerated idea
Authors make deals with publishers because publishers provide a service that makes the book better and easier to sell If the publishers vanished, books would be worse, harder to make, and harder for you to find
It is no more true that "the price of an ebook just goes to pay some fatcat publisher, the author doesn't care" any more than "the ticket price to a live show just goes to the venue and their landlord" (hell the latter might be MORE true)
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