annoyedInstead, I want to talk about illegal resales.
Yesterday afternoon, some bold soul wandering the internet jungles encountered a site that looked too good to be true: a private seller offering huge numbers of ebooks, some by extremely popular authors, for two dollars each, or ten for ten. That's, like, amazing! That's incredible! And best of all, that's totally against the law! This individual told a few authors, who told a few more, who told a few more, and then the wrath of the internet came down upon that seller's head, since people don't take kindly to being stolen from. The sales page was taken down. The seller changed the name on her twitter. All done, right?
Not quite.
First, there's the matter of the seller herself. She's not going to be named, because I don't play that kind of game, but I think it's important to note that she justified her actions by saying that she was trying to make money to pay for her kidney transplant medications. This? Is a sad story. It may even be a true story. It's also the kind of thing that's sort of calculated to make people back off and not want to be the bad guy by yelling at the woman who's just trying to afford her drugs, so she doesn't die. To this I say...
I am so very, very sorry that people are ill. I hate that we live in a country without medical care for everyone. It's a huge, scary, horrible issue. But I can't sit back and let people profit off my work because they're sick. There are a lot of sick people, and sometimes, I'm one of them. If I said "oh, it's okay because you're sick," I'd wind up in a world of trouble. And Alice would be dead, since only being paid for my work enabled me to pay for her extremely expensive, extremely unexpected vet bill last year.
Second, I can almost understand people who put things up for free. Yes, they're stealing, and no, I don't condone it, but they're not trying to profit off someone else's property. They're not taking cookies out of the back of a bakery and selling them for half-price at a food truck down the street, they're giving out cookies for free. One of the big "you're over-simplifying, you're not seeing the big picture" arguments in the whole book piracy discussion is "not every download is a sale." Well, if someone is selling my books, independent of my publisher, every download is a sale, and it's a sale I'm not getting paid for.
People like getting things for less money. It's the natural way of mankind. It's why we clip coupons, shop at Ross, and wear last year's sweaters. But there's legitimate discounting, and there's stealing, and sadly, it can be hard to tell them apart.
Finally, and most troubling to me, this represents a snapshot of the biggest problem I see coming down the pike, as ebooks become a bigger and bigger percentage of the books sold: there is no ebook secondary market.
I love used bookstores. I exist because of used bookstores. In the last month, I have been to three Half-Price Books, two independent used bookstores, and a library book sale. When I was a kid, eighty percent of my books came from these places. Without the secondary market, I wouldn't have been able to read the way I did, and I would have grown up to be someone very different. I am worried about the smart, poor kids of today, and I can easily see more and more sites like this cropping up as people try to "resell" things that can't actually be resold.
I don't know that there's a solution. I'm worried, and I'm scared for what comes next. But this pirate site, at least, came down.
Please, remember that there's no secondary ebook market, and that if a price seems too good to be true, unless it's a promotion offered directly by a publisher...
...it probably isn't legit.
ETA: Please stop trying to make this a discussion about piracy. As noted above, that is not this post. We are treading old ground, and I do not have the energy or time to moderate this conversation right now.
September 15 2011, 01:49:40 UTC 5 years ago
HOWEVER. I already owned at least one hard copy of every single one, sometimes two or three. And then when they became available online in legit, pay-money-please editions, I bought 'em all again and deleted the old versions. That's the only circumstances in which I can talk myself into feeling even slightly okay about it, and it still made my conscience squirm. :P
September 15 2011, 20:37:55 UTC 5 years ago Edited: September 15 2011, 20:48:34 UTC
Legally, of course, there's a world of a difference, and there -is- value in keeping the law (also, value in keeping the law as something that most people keep and want to keep, rather than something that most people have found themselves guiltlessly violating at some point in the past, but that's another issue).
Now, torrenting (and other P2P downloads) actually open up another can of worms, as under normal use, someone using a P2P download system isn't -just- downloading the work; they're also uploading the work and aiding and abetting other users who are downloading the work who might very well not have the ethical right to do so.
The one that makes me squirm is where I want to read a -long- manga series, and do -not- want said series taking up space in my apartment. Nor do I want to own or reread the series. The obvious answer is the buy the series in ebooks, but they don't exist. Or, oh, I could take it out of the library, which works except that as a long manga series, much of it isn't in the library (oops). Oh, or I could torrent the thing -- and get better (overall; less professional, but more accurate and more likely to keep subtlties in meaning) translations that don't take up significant space. Result: I buy some, take some out of the library, download some, and feel guilty. And probably eventually buy some more, even if it's mostly just to contribute back (and utility can be gained by giving stuff away, of course, but not when it's the 30th book in a manga series).
[edit]
BTW, sorry that this is functionally a comment about piracy; I mostly made it because there was something interesting to respond to, but that doesn't make it not hijack.
Regarding theft (or rather, commercial piracy, which I rate as fraud, but nevermindthat):
Fraud is fraud. By selling "discounted" pirated copies of your works, the merchant has defrauded the buyers (who presumably thought they were buying a legitimate copy of the work) and significantly harmed you (by through fraud, taking money that was rightfully yours). Also, piracy is illegal, and -commercial- piracy quite rightfully carries extra penalties.
Medical issues are no more a legitimate reason for commercial piracy than they are for, say, credit card fraud. Except that nobody (I think) would say "I'm sorry I reused the number on your card to buy stuff; I was sick and needed to buy medicine!"