I am an author in the middle of my career. I make my living on book sales. Personally I would prefer not to gamble my survival on this airy assumption that "people would figure it out".
I think your maths is off. A literary novel is a success if it sells 10,000 copies in hardback. I'm pretty sure that doesn't entail getting the book in front of a hundred million people.
no, the conversion funnel is "people see ad -> people click on ad/notice book -> people buy book". Getting the advert in front of 100mm people to sell 10K copies seems reasonable.
If all book sales were electronic, that might indeed invite a reassessment of publishers' value in securing distribution. But ebooks are only about 20% of book sales (and that figure is not rising).
Here in the UK, if you go to a library and take out a book, the author does get compensated, it's called the Public Lending Right. Apparently in Denmark they've had it since 1941 so I don't think it took ebooks to make it technologically possible.
It looks like Public Lending Right schemes for printed books exist in only a couple dozen countries and even fewer implement them as the UK has with payments per-loan (Canada does a one-time payment per copy).
The Danish system works only because the state has agreed to foot the bill for whatever amount of money gets transferred to publishers.
> In Denmark, library book loans fell from 34 million in 2000 to around 28 million in 2014. 38 E-lending has increased rapidly in Denmark since the launch of its eReolen national public library e-lending platform in 2011, but e-lending still only represented just over 2% of all book loans in 2014.39 Interestingly, eReolen has seen a surprising expansion in the number electronically loaned audiobooks, which are now outperforming e-books in the eReolen’s monthly loan statistics.
You're admitting what most anti-copyright people don't want to admit – if instead of bookshops we only had the Emergency Library, certain classes of works would indeed go away, including most good fiction, not to mention history, biography, reportage etc. You say that's "just what happens" like it's some ineluctable natural process, but none of this is preordained. The traditional model has a lot of defenders – including the majority of readers who are still happy to pay for books – and with those defenders' help it can survive.
If a market's survival is incumbent upon screwing-up new technology for everybody then I say "Let it die". It it means having draconian laws that tie up the most precious products of human toil in too-lengthy "protection" terms, to the point that works of culture are lost, then I say "Let it die".
Not being able to make a living producing something that no one will pay for sounds very much like a natural, preordained process to me. I can't make a living manufacturing buggy whips or operating elevators anymore. Technology made those jobs go away. It's sad perhaps, from a nostalgic perspective, but the world moved on.
If a business model needs "defenders" in the face of technological change then it's no longer a viable model.
I don't believe a transactional model is the only one that can work. It happens to be convenient for a certain type of creator, but that doesn't mean it's the only one.
I will clarify that I'm most certainly not anti-copyright. I think a lot of value can be derived from a copyright regime based on a more balanced social contract. US copyright law, and those who have "harmonized" with the US, has shifted much too far in the direction of favoring the owners of "intellectual property".
I don't understand where you're getting the idea that books are something "no one will pay for". Sales of books are generally stable or rising. They are not like buggy whips.
I also don't understand how it is that you're describing books as "the most precious products of human toil", but you're simultaneously saying you're happy to sacrifice them if it means you get copyright reform.
And I also don't understand how copyright law is screwing up your "technology". It screws up your ability to get certain things for free. But if someone wants to create a DRM-free ebook and give it away, they are still perfectly able to do so.
Unlikely and definitely unproven. Historical precedent rather shows that at least 96 % of the books would be produced even without copyright, given less than 4 % bothered to register the copyright when it was mandatory. And less than 1 % of the 4 % required a copyright term longer than 14 years.
https://archive.org/details/howtofixcopyrigh00patr/page/104/...
If tomorrow Congress repealed the Berne convention and shortened the copyright term to 5 years from publication, in order to make the Internet Archive's "National Emergency Library" permanent even without fair use, probably a good 99.9 % of the works would still be produced.
In the UK, revenue from ebook sales grew 3% between 2018 and 2019. Where is your evidence that the business model of "counting copies" – i.e. selling books to people who want to read them – doesn't work any more?
I'm seeing reports of a 5% decrease (a ~152 million pound decrease) in print book sales in the UK from 2018 to 2019. "Selling books to people who want to read them" seems to be a declining business.
The 3% increase in ebook licensing revenue from 2018 to 2019 was an absolutely increase of ~20 million pounds. That doesn't absorb event a quarter of the decrease in print sales. Given the relative price parity between the two, I'd say that people who aren't purchasing print books aren't licensing ebooks, by and large, either.
Unless the book publishing industry can come up with some analog to subscription streaming services, or can use their lobby to kill general purpose computing devices, I don't think the long game looks very good for their business model. Video and audio media are well suited to the streaming market because there's enough inconvenience in making infringing copies to make paying license feeds worthwhile (at least, with current media file sizes and network speeds).
I don't think ebooks have as strong a value proposition for paying the license fee vs. making an infringing copy.
2018 was also the first time in five years that overall revenues fell – 2018 was still better than 2014 and 2015. The idea that we should scuttle the entire publishing industry and switch to Spotify because of these minor fluctuations from year to year prove the "business model is dying" is absolutely cockamamie. "Legacy publishing" continues to support the production of great work – that is what counts. (It is also my livelihood as an author, so yes I'm biased.) I shudder at the alternative – say Kindle Unlimited, the closest thing that's been tried to a streaming model, which has worked well for romance novelists and romance readers and pretty much nobody else.
fwiwi, I'm continiously buying relatively expensive printed books, mostly technical. I think I will continue doing so, at least as long as I can oder printed copies.
Paper copies have a few important advantages. They do not distract me. Do not run out of battery, and I can use visual and physical clues for finding topics, see my progress, make notes, etc.
Five years of using Kindle, proved that even a dedicated e-reader in no ways can provide a similar experience. So, at least for a niche printed copies would be a thing for quite some time.
I am an author and I making my living from book sales. You're right, I'm absolutely obsessed with money, in the sense that I need money to buy food and pay my electricity bill.
> Robbing a bank and giving away the money is a decision not based on money or liability, but you shouldn't be very surprised you still get put in prison for it.
Quoting the other comment here to make my point.
AFAIK IA they did not give away the books, the books still were shared the same way as before, with DRM and expiration dates. They just temporaly removed the limitations of amount of books you can loan and increased the loan period with an initial max end date of June 30.
So, yeah, what IA did is pretty different from robbing anything, in unprecedented times of a global pandemic they provided access to a digital library the same way a public library which holds those books would in normal times.
