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>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?

Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? There's millions of books already written and it makes zero sense that people would stop writing. People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money and they created literature before copyright was a thing.

The human tradition is storytelling. The idea that storytelling was something a company could own and other's weren't allowed to tell is very, very new in our history.

People write without any profit motive today. It's weird of the OP to think of writing in such a narrow space as commercialization.

> Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read?

Because there would not be human written books about the present. All books would be about the past. But literature is not stuck in time. Today writers talk about topics and feelings that writers of the last century might never know or experienced. Many people read books to better understand the today world (non-fiction) and to better understand their today feelings (fiction).

> People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money.

Agree, but most of the writing that we have from the past still came with some form of financial incentives. Shakespeare didn't write all of the compositions just because he wanted to express himself. He was making money with theater performances. Many religious writing got patronage by the church. Dante Alighieri had a career as politician, Plato came from an aristocratic family. Writing was reserved to elites because education was expensive and people had to work for food.

Today we are lucky because education is accessible and printing is cheap.

> they created literature before copyright was a thing.

Copyright wasn't a thing because replicating content was hard. Try to manually copy a book...

Notably, Shakespeare lived in a time before copyright and famously ripped off plots from his contempories. I dont think he's a great reference for the argument that there would be no writing about the modern world if you removed copyright.

First, people want tonread books that speak to them and their lives, older books are not that.

Second, people write to be read. It takes huge amount of effort too. With no potential reward for it at all, they stop.

Third, we are social animals. If you dont see people reading, if you dont read yourself, you wont even think of writing.

> physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write

there have been many times I've wanted to pay for an ebook but found that the only places that sell it apply DRM to it, so shadow library it is

>On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people.

Which exists to enrich Disney and other large corps, while they hide behind artists as a human shield.

>Artists need some form of reward.

Right, as do artists who use the work of other artists as their starting point. Copyright holders aren't bill and bob artist, they are massive corporate trolls throwing around the weight of almost 100 years of our cultural heritage, sucking the marrow from its bones.

>On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.

The books are getting digitised into a permanent record of all our cultural heritage. It just sucks we don't have control over it. If only there was a way we could get them digitised AND control our cultural heritage. HMMMMMMM.

>Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write.

The incentive to write is being killed by slop groups like 20Booksto50K and Kindle which predate AI by at least a decade. AI just lets them work faster.

>We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free

Excellent

>But there would be no human writers left.

Unlikely, but there would definitely be no Disneys or Conde Nasts left, which is a massively pro social outcome.

>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?

In a world with all books digitised and accessible to read? A huge huge huge incentive. I already partake if books are too expensive where I am. It would take me the rest of my life to read all the books I already want to read. What kind of inane dribble is the idea that copyright makes it interesting to read? I havent even read all of Howard and he's in the public domain (in cool countries at least)