

The Slow Death of the American Author - Jun8
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/opinion/the-slow-death-of-the-american-author.html?hp

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Jun8
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
Indeed. Did Tolstoy have to live off his royalties?

------
gwern
> 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
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.

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panzagl
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.

