Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

The entire framework we have for paying authors is through distribution cost. Now we have zero distribution cost!

The entire business model you are relying on for income has been completely broken for 30 years.

You aren't losing sales. You are missing them. They aren't being taken away from you, they are passing you by. The result may be the same for you personally, but it's still a critical difference.

You - and every other author - need a new framework to attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or even if such a thing could exist. I do know, however, that pretending the old system can still work in the digital age isn't fixing anything for anyone.

View on HN

You just kind of handwave the whole problem away. Why aren't authors paid for the work they do? You can that like it isn't true and that it cannot be true.

>You - and every other author - need a new framework to attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or even if such a thing could exist.

So basically you're deciding the entire industry of book writing is broken and needs to be entirely re-created BUT you also don't know how or what it should even look like. But until then we should all just be okay with pirating the work of others and thereby robbing them of their means of living, because it has been decided that the old system is beyond functioning.

> You just kind of handwave the whole problem away.

No, that's what copyright does. It demands we all play the game, then it's totally unprepared for that not working out. Someone used a computer and an internet connection to share data without paying me money? shocked Pikachu face

I'm at least admitting there's a problem. Just because I don't have a solution does not mean I don't understand the problem. Not all problems are that easily solved.

If I did have a solution, I would be implementing it. After all, a solution to that problem would be one of the most valuable contributions to society I can think of. At least one of the most highly valued.

> So basically you're deciding the entire industry of book writing is broken

I didn't decide. I was speaking descriptively, not prescriptively; something the copyright industry seems rather unfamiliar with.

> But until then we should all just be okay with pirating the work of others and thereby robbing them of their means of living, because it has been decided that the old system is beyond functioning.

It's not a matter of being OK with it or not. We can't compel every person to follow the rules. We've been trying that method for 30 years, and it's been blowing up in our faces the entire time.

The reality is that copyright is a false promise. We can't force people to add a monetary transaction to the distribution of information, when information can be distributed anonymously at next to zero cost.

You're so worried about the ethical implications of piracy, but what about the ethical implications of the false promise that is copyright?

We are telling authors every day that they can make money selling books, but that is only true occasionally, by chance. We have no way to guarantee that will happen. We can't attribute every successful book sale to copyright enforcement, because we know copyright enforcement is broadly failing.

It's time to stop treating this like a game of good vs evil, and recognize the failure of the game itself. Even if that means recognizing that we already lost.

You talk about wanting to find a solution, so I'd like to share where I think one might be found. Not that I've found it, I just think I know where to look.

The problem with books is that we live in a partially post-scarcity society. Star Trek envisioned post-scarcity everything, but we live in a partially post-scarcity society: Food, pure metals, clean water etc. are all still scarce, but anything that can be digitized is not. Books can be digitized, so they are subject to post-scarcity economics, but most of the author's needs are subject to scarcity economics.

What bridges the these two economies, and where I believe the answer can be found, is in attention. Attention is scarce, but it is also necessary to consume anything in the post-scarcity economy. It exists in both worlds somehow, and I therefore believe it's closely related to the problem of how an author can get paid.

Your logic doesn’t make sense to me. Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).

Pirate Bay does that at scale—millions of “friends”, and all at the same quality. It’s unsustainable to authors. Don’t tell the authors to find “a new framework”.

What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up for a weekly subscription and email out individually DRMed copies of the chapters each week?

Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic terms, don’t go around shaming the authors.

> Pirate Bay does that at scale—millions of “friends”, and all at the same quality. It’s unsustainable to authors. Don’t tell the authors to find “a new framework”.

I'm not telling authors to find a new framework. Such a thing doesn't exist. I'm not even sure it could exist.

And that sucks, because authors need a new framework.

> What do you expect them to do?

I don't. I have zero expectations.

> Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic terms, don’t go around shaming the authors.

I'm not here shaming anyone. I'm just being honest. This system is broken. We're all looking at the same shattered pieces. It's wild that I'm the only one here who isn't pretending everything is OK.

> Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).

Post-digital, a legally purchased book can be shared with no friends, none at a time.

> Your logic doesn’t make sense to me. Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).

Sure, but books also had a much higher value due to a relative lack of competitors. Books now have to compete with a plethora of free media available on YouTube, forums, blogs, etc.

Some of them may be of lower quality, but it's hard to beat free. Lots of us have taught ourselves skills via free resources that we probably would have had to pay for at one point.

It's much harder to charge for knowledge than it once was.

Well, post digital era we still buy/rent games, video and music.

I don't see why something similar couldn't be done, pay monthly and you can read whatever your want, and what you read depends on where the money from your subscription goes. And as distribution costs are lower, higher % of it should go to the writers. Hell, amazon could just do that, except of course they wouldn't give a fair cut...

At zero cost to try new authors it could possibly be a good way for more niche stuff, you can just page thru any book that you want with no cost but time

> What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up for a weekly subscription and email out individually DRMed copies of the chapters each week?

There is actually one guy doing it on patreon but he already have YT audience for music gear reviews (book is about electronic music ideas and tips). So it is possible, just kinda hard as you already need to have publicity.

The gp doesn’t have a problem. He will make money by something else then writing the book.

His readers are at loss. Their book won’t come into existence.

Being unmotivated to write is still a problem even if it's not a financial one.

It's only a problem is he's unmotivated and he wants to write. If he just decides not to write then, it's pretty simple for him to move not. Not so for the readers who pirated his first book, found it expanded their minds and now are hungry for more by the same author.

Being unmotivated to work is still a problem even if it's not a financial one. Getting paid remains an efficient motivator though.

Not being able to pay the rent is a major issue preventing people to do stuff like writing a new book.

That might be frustrating for his would-be readers, but in the same way that it’s frustrating to me that there aren’t many great small flagship smartphones. It’s a bummer, but I’m not going to genuinely complain that I’m being wronged because there aren’t enough people out there willing to buy a small phone.

I am happy to complain that we as a society have limited ways to reward people who share knowledge that we all benefit from. The answer, if you ask me, is to levy a tax and let citizens decide where the money goes via quadratic voting.

It exists already, dependent on genre.

royalroad.com has thousands of stories in various subgenres of fantasy that are available for free.

The business model is, the author builds up a substantial number of pages/chapters, begins publishing on RR, when they reach a big enough readership they launch a patreon which is typically 20-50 pages ahead which their patreons can read.

Once they have a couple of books worth of material, they remove the first books worth of content from RR and publish it on Kindle Unlimited, which is an all you can read service for about $8 a month from amazon. They then move onto audible versions at a later date assuming all goes well. Physical books are a complete afterthought btw.

The readership doesn't care about typo's, grammer or editing or prose they just want the story.

I expect this will become a fairly standard model in multiple genres going forward.

Definitely a fan of this model. Anecdotal, but I recently subscribed to AMC+ because the pirate streaming site I was using didn't have the latest episode of a show I wanted to watch. I could have waited a literal day, or gone to a torrent tracker, but paying the $9 was just easier and shows support for the show.

I read a lot on RR too and support a half dozen authors on patreon. But I've also seen those authors complaining when their work gets pirated from RR or patreon and put elsewhere. It's a good model but I don't think it is any more immune to loss of earnings from piracy then the models that have gone before.

I agree that this is a huge problem to be solved, but I don’t think it excuses piracy in any way.

On another note, one emerging new framework is patreon. Instead of paying for printing/distribution, you’re paying the author directly to continue writing.

This!

Over 3/4 of the media I pay for is creative commons, redistributable, non-commercial, no-modifications, attribution licensed. (The other 1/4 is streaming video, music, etc, which is not CC licensed.)

I am 1%-5% of some of the CC artists' income. I'm probably < 0.000001% of the income for the corporate media sources I pay.

> The entire business model you are relying on for income has been completely broken for 30 years.

Many people have their lives depending on that business model. They just cannot realize that such system is dying, if not already dead. It's a false hope dictated by self-preservation.

The same could be said about software. Broken from birth I guess. Music too. Movies?

The main difference with books is how easy they are to distribute. The other forms take up more space and are not as trivial to leave at an end point to be picked up. Music and movies also have big interested who might sue you. Software was easier to copy - you would rather have my .exe than my .zip of hacked up SaaS code that won't work next year.

To answer what the next framework would be like. I think it would be crappier than just selling the book, and support fewer people. It would be bad for the reader too. Often the act of paying for a book makes it more valuable - the emotional investment in it means you will finish it and make use of it.

> The entire framework we have for paying authors is through distribution cost.

This isn't true through. The price in funding creation of the book (there is value on having the author focus exclusively on writing the book rather than finding time while doing a full time job), editing, marketing, etc.

It's like saying the price of a phone is simply a tally of the cost of each individual component, where you have to factor in engineering, R&D, etc.

The price of a phone is paid when you buy the phone. That's when and where the transaction happens.

If that transaction doesn't happen, then none of the other things you mentioned get funded.

You can't get the phone without a transaction happening. It's a physical object, so moving it has a distribution cost.

You can get the contents of a book without doing a transaction. You can share the contents of a book just as freely as I'm sharing this comment.

Because there isn't a transaction happening, there is no source of income. There is no time or place to ask readers for money. Money isn't even involved in the first place; neither are goods or services - apart from a trivial amount of bandwidth.

Treating arts like they are singular objects to be made only once (or services to be performed once) doesn't work anymore. Now they are instances. They can be recreated or performed for free. By anyone. Anywhere. At any time. Without anyone else watching.

You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a transaction. You can never stop the signal.

>You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a transaction.

IMO, you shouldn't hijack someone else's work to make it free. If the person creating it wants it to be distributed freely, they have the option to make it so.

> You can't get the phone without a transaction happening.

This is also the case (not always) for a book, because the creation has a cost. Again, the author can choose to make it free, but they should also be free to charge a fee for it. It's pretty arrogant to take that choice away from them.

I'm not taking anything out hijacking anyone. I'm not here to talk about whether piracy is or isn't moral. Believe it or not, that's totally irrelevant.

The cold hard truth is that an author can't choose to make their book free, because they can't choose to make it - the book itself - cost.

Books aren't individual objects anymore. They cost nothing to reproduce. They cost nothing to redistribute. Any value we assign to a book can be infinitely diluted by anyone at any time, because it's free and instantaneous for them to make new copies and share them.

It's pretty arrogant to tell authors that copyright will provide any guarantee to protect their income. It doesn't. It can't.

It's pretty arrogant to blame the death of copyright on piracy. Piracy is not the cause, it's the result. It's not the knife, it's the open wound.

This point of view ignores the fact that books have a cost to create, unless you think they just wave their hands and the content comes out fully formed.

> It's pretty arrogant to tell authors that copyright will provide any guarantee to protect their income. It doesn't. It can't.

> It's pretty arrogant to blame the death of copyright on piracy. Piracy is not the cause, it's the result. It's not the knife, it's the open wound.

I have made no comments about either of these subjects, so I don't see how it is relevant.

Let's just hope people remember how to write books by the time you figure it out.

Complete rubbish. You're paying for value.

You're paying for secrets.

When secrets are written down on paper, then it's hard for people to share them without buying more paper from you. Sure, people can copy the paper and publish it for free, but convincing them not to is still a scalable solution. Printing takes work. At least, it did when copyright was invented.

When secrets are published on the internet, anyone can publish them again for free. Worldwide. Instantly. Literal billions of copies if they feel like it. There's no holding that back. It's not remotely scalable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com