Novelist Blames Piracy On Open Source Culture

joeflies writes "CNN published an article entitled 'Digital Piracy Hits the e-Book Industry.' It quotes the following statement by novelist Sherman Alexie: 'With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away. It terrifies me.'" The article also points out a couple of interesting statistics for a "slumping" industry beset by piracy: "Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers," and "consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."

Comments

If the formula is flawed the result means nothing

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times."

As usual this person makes the very false assumption that 100,000 downloads equals 100,000 lost sales, when in reality it is more likely that close to 100,000 people who would have never bought the book are now reading Dan Brown when they never would have otherwise. This will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown in the future as these people ask others "have you read ...", and those people who haven't opt to buy the book and read it, just as happens in the music industry. You can't count someone downloading something they would never have paid for otherwise as a lost sale, and the kind of free advertising they are getting would be otherwise extermely costly.

Re:BZZZZT WRONG

[Anonymous Coward]

JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in desperation on welfare. Might she have done so if she believed her work would be distributed freely without any compensation to her?

Oh, and what a tragic loss to human culture that would have been. To never have enjoyed the cut-and-paste-from-every-other-fantasy-novel-plus-nicking-the-basic-plot-of-star-wars of Harry Potter... my life would have been so empty.

But seriously... how did "artists" survive before copyright? How did the renaissance get going? Who said that shitty writers had a human right to earn a fortune from derivative novels at the expense of draconian laws and computers that are locked down to prevent even the most basic control by their owner? Huh? Huh?

Re:What do you expect.

[bemymonkey]

"J.K. Pot has thus far refused to make any of her Hairy Porter books available physically because of library fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in pixels."

Oh yeah, that REALLY looks like an article with lots of facts and most definitely deserves a +5 Interesting or +5 Informative... *facepalm*