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

The low figure is a surprise!

[Sockatume]

Amazon sells on the order of 100M books per year, and has on the order of 100M unique customers. That means the average book sales rate is just one book per customer per year. So Kindle owners are only buying three books per year? That's not something to shout about!

Re:What do you expect.

[bemymonkey]

Ooops.

Re:Let me paraphrase that

[selven]

He was not comparing copyright to slavery, he was saying that change is not a bad thing, using slavery as an example. You're misrepresenting the intent of the parent's analogy.