plunging in

[gfish]

I know I should stay clear of Amazonfail, but I just want to say that a publisher which can't make a profit selling $9 etexts (or $5, or $2) deserves to go bankrupt. If amortized editing and design costs are really the lion's share of a physical book, the system is deeply, deeply broken.

(Even applying design costs to the etext version is largely ridiculous. How much design work does an etext need? I'd prefer it as a raw text file anyway, but a LaTeX-generated PDF would also be just fine as well. The only reason for fancy design in the first place is to catch people's attention in a store. Etext selection and browsing is nothing like that, so why bother with it in the first place? Tradition? Snob factor? Anything that can't be seen in the scaled down image of the book cover in an Amazon listing is a complete waste of money.)

I remain unconvinced of the long-term viability of selling data as a business model. But if you want to find a way for authors to make money, don't make it even harder by trying to defend these dinosaurs at the same time.

Comments

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

*wry grins* Intellectual property has been not mapping to physical property for years and years now. For instance, you own the copyright on the poem you posted the other day, even if you haven't written it down on a piece of paper. And that means that it's illegal for someone to reproduce without your permission, even electronically, and even more illegal for them to sell it without your permission, even electronically.

For that matter, think about a screenplay. It's intellectual property, certainly, and it doesn't really map directly to physical property. Can you hold a movie in your hands? Well, you can hold a DVD, but is that the actual movie? What if a movie is made from your screenplay (with or without you being paid for it) but doesn't go to DVD?

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Um, I know what intellectual property is, and it's an area of law I follow moderately closely.

There are a couple of things to look at here: first, intellectual property does not behave like physical property. This is fairly obvious - if I steal your cow, you don't have a cow anymore. If I pirate your music, there might be something to be said for value dilution (though that's less trivial than it might seem at first glance) but I haven't removed something from you at all. I'm not advocating that there shouldn't be something in the general genre of what we now call intellectual property, but that it's being generally discussed in terms of physical property is simple-minded and misleading.

Second, and far more in our faces (though really, I think the first is the more interesting philosophical issue) the social, legal and technological landscape in which intellectual property exists has changed a lot, and is changing. Patents are being used more to suppress than promote innovation. Copyright is getting absurd - in the US, it's hard to say if anything contemporaneous with Mickey Mouse or younger will ever become public domain. Is intellectual property something that a creator should be able to hold and pass down to their heirs in perpetuity? What social function does that serve? Again, I'm not against any form of copyright, but what we have is getting pretty silly.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

For my company, patents are almost purely used to suppress competition and stifle innovation by companies without enough dosh to defend their innovations. Anything we actually care about is a trade secret.
I think copyright is much more defensible, insofar as it's *hard* to create a worthwhile artistic work, but incredibly easy to duplicate it. But I agree there is zero public good in nigh-indefinite copyright periods, and significant public harm.
But with that said, most of what I consider the greatest works of humanity were created before copyright existed. If we got rid of copyright, people would still be creating stuff.