A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book. For many it's an innate desire, much like making music. If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a while. But I’m pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an excellent job of that stuff rather than just assume that pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it’s enormously naive to assume we’d lose nothing if we took away art as a profession - especially since it’s so obvious it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other professions.
Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!
It's an excellent snapshot of the world of chemical information on the cusp of computerization.
The publishing industry is a whole lot more than someone drafting in word…
Anybody can hire an editor.
They absolutely do and would do more often without copyright laws holding them back. Every person who finds a book they want to share with others would be free to make improvements as they saw fit, and that would certainty include edits and correcting errors.
Even today we have rouge editors who take copyrighted works, then illegally edit and distribute them along with their changes because they feel it improves the works in question. Examples include fan edits of films to improve the narrative and streamline edits of mythbusters to remove obnoxious repetitive cruft.
Other examples of free editors can be found in Wikipeida articles, fanfic projects, fan translation projects, and video game walkthroughs. Even mods/patches for video games can be a form of "free editing".
There are very few forms of media where I haven't seen people providing some form of editing services for free. (I can't say I've seen it for oil paintings yet I guess)
I think Wikipedia is a massive, living counterexample to this. It has tons of problems, but the lack of people willing to do the work for free is not one of them.
After 3 days it suddenly struck me how hilarious this is. How does one fact check if substantial amounts are gone or impossible to find?
You get the modern internet, great editing, wonderful font set, the best marketing money can buy under the sun, no references. Sort of factual, we think... uhh... trust us!
[1] - void(0)
But not all books need all of those services. The editing, copy editing, and fact checking can be left to the responsibility of a motivated producer to provide, or to a motivated consumer to demand. (Of course, a producer might decide to skip those, and serve non-discerning consumers who don't worry about factuality. But … well, that's where we are, anyway, and always have been. There was yellow journalism well before social media.) Typesetting can be handled automatically for bulks that never leave the computer, which is probably many of them. I'm quite OK if books aren't marketed to me; I think I've hardly ever intentionally consumed a book based on an ad anyway.
As to funding, the whole point of the claim to which you were responded was that there are plenty of people are willing to write for free, so that there is no need for separate funding. This means that we'll get literature that reflects the skills and interests of the people who are interested enough in writing to do it for free, and who can support themselves while they do so. Well, OK; it's not a representative sample, but neither is the literature we have now, nor has it ever been historically. (Of course, too, some writing is inherently costly: travel writing, for example, is costly even if you are willing to do the writing itself for free. But not all writing needs all of these services.)
I'm curious (but not complaining!) about the downvote—whether it indicates disagreement with my claim that some of these services are not needed for some books, or something else. If the latter, then I'd like to know what, to understand better the nature of the argument. If the former, I would be very interested to hear that case! (That is, the case that all books need all of the services "edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing".)
As an academic, where publishers are particularly parasitic, and where academics do, indeed, provide all of these services for free (and worse, since we still wind up paying, directly or indirectly, the publishers' exorbitant fees), I share the sentiment of my sibling commenter pessimizer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975366).
But only a tiny percentage of the population is any good at writing books. If those people stop doing so or greatly cut back on doing so it is a big loss even if that doesn't change the total number of books written each year by a noticeable amount.
Ed wood made a lot of movies, they were not any better after he had gained a lot of experience. The assumption that there is significant improvement on what you with time only occurs if there is self reflection and feedback loops and an incentive to progress.
Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?
One might dream of all software and books being free from copyright in the same way but it works even better the other way around.
If we take the natural order of things. [say] plants replicating themselves with mammals grazing on them or birds dropping delicious eggs all over the place...
What kind of complete imbecile would attempt to control that?
The topic most worthy of debate isn't the events, it might not even be the discussion about people who desire to reap the benefits from forcing others to behave against their own interest.
The real topic is people who desire to accomplish something that is not and will never be possible.
They have been at it not since 1790 but FOREVER! People have always attempted to deny access to knowledge and stop technological progress. Even other peoples entertainment must happen on their terms.
The copyright circus is not about authors getting paid. It is marketing slang for the Spanish inquisition.
We can massage the words to make them sound more appealing but the purpose of technology is what it does. This is every bit as terrifying as it sounds.
The purpose of splitting the atom is to erase all life on this planet over primitive mammalian territory disputes.
Even the most sophisticated things we do can be traced back to supper primitive instinctive behavior that (in its defense) took 4 billion years to calibrate.
It is not that we don't know how to care for others but it is hard to balance it with reproduction.
If we make life easy and comfortable for everyone they are going to reproduce until non of that remains.
Thus we have this drive to make others miserable while completely unaware of why exactly we do this: I got a good thing going for myself - fuck everyone else!
We've build giant automatons to make ourselves miserable!
yeah, we just duplicate and share all of those books that you like to think of as your personal property. Sucks to be you doesn't it? It was not like your motivations were honorable or even reasonable.
Imagine how we created the rule of law and how all that had to step aside so that inspectors can search your home for a radio or TV because you didn't pay for a license.
Out of the way, we have illegal books to burn!... and scholars!
Piracy? Surely you mean heresy?
In conclusion I think, in an argument between barely civilized men, you choice of methods for winning the debate shouldn't sink as low as your opponents but it is fair to meet them half way. No need to torture them into a confession, burn them at the stake or the horrific censorship of their dialog. We can just mock them while copying the books and the movies and rewriting the software from scratch. After all, we are the nice people, its so nice from us that we allow these neo-inquisitors to talk their little talk in public. How they want to do just a little bit of infringement by searching your property, perhaps not burn the heretic today but at least fine little jimmy a few hundred thousand. We can just laugh behind our hand when they talk their little talk.
How dare we have bigger things to worry about: Preserving the ecosystem, infesting other worlds and we should eventually be able to fix the population issues by extending life by just a few hundred years.
Go read a book about it, its free!
When this happens we will finally have the Year of the Linux Desktop, and it will be a good year.
For all we know Steven King could have authored the best Harry Potter novel of all time, but we'll never know that because even if he wanted to, laws would have prevented him from writing one. King actually might have enough money to make that happen anyway, but billions of other humans, each of which might also write the best Harry Potter novel would never be able to afford to under current laws.
It's easy to look at the good works that get created despite our copyright system and think that it's working out pretty well without giving consideration to what we're being denied because of it.
I think it's fine to give authors a temporary monopoly of say ten or twenty years, to reward production. The problem is when the modern special-interest-driven capitalist system hooks into this and keeps lobbying to increase the length of copyright, benefitting estates and conglomerates, rather than the initial authors doing the creative work. And the public pays the cost.
I think the point is to pay successful writers so they keep writing.
Pay them and distribute ebooks for free. Where is the contradiction? The money just have to come from other sources than selling the books.
Free ebooks mean more readers. This is something desirable, no?
Few times this has been mentioned by an american in some group of people somewhere I managed to be too, puzzled looks from all others followed (few times also from other americans). That's literally the only time I ever heard anybody mentioning wanting to write a book (well apart from doing children's book made just of illustrations from 1 german lady, but that ain't the same category, and she just went and did it by the time I met her and it was great).
That music making mentioned has much higher popularity, we all have been young and some still are in our hearts.
I don't think I am that much of an outlier, I've spent tons of time with folks from all continents, cultures and religions when backpacking, working, socializing in our tiny cosmopolitan metropole of Geneva. I don't want to state that nobody wants to write, but "huge percentage" is roughly in 1/2% if I am optimistic and take everybody that ever even fleetingly mentioned it by their word.
To me personally it just sounds like too much actual effort and self-torture for some at-best mediocre output. One can learn whole new sports, hobbies, do long adventures that will create tons of memories that will make you smile and have that distant look into past when you will be dying and remembering them... that's worth investing some time into, not 10 millionth average book