*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, September 14th, 2012 12:51pm PDT - promote requested by ZappaDanMan.

Change the incentive structure, I agree.

It's all *lies.

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*talks

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Great talk, but as usual I find attempts at comparing the theft of physical materials (like, dinner in this case) to downloading media (his book) to be misleading at best and utterly dishonest at worst.

@00Scud00 Maybe they're not on the same level or whatever, but I think he's comparing the psychology of it, I guess it applies to doing something that you know is wrong.

Besides, As an author, wouldn't you feel cheated if people freely shared the work you took so many days to write without giving you a penny? If you just want to give back to the community, fine, but if you're a writer, and you need the money, wouldn't you feel cheated?

Being someone who has done as much downloading as I have (and will probably continue to do so) I don't think I'm in a position to complain about it too much. If I were a writer, artist, or musician and I was making enough to make a decent living then I'd probably shrug off the rest and be happy that people were actually paying attention and get on with my life. I think the digital age has really thrown many of us for a loop, I can't remember if there was a time in human history before this when we were able to reproduce a product at virtually no cost and yet our thinking is still heavily rooted in the concepts of scarcity and supply and demand. So our entrepreneurs and our business tycoons spend centuries perfecting the art of manipulating these market forces and have suddenly run smack into something that is shiny and new and also resistant to the old ways of doing things, chaos ensues.

Many authors spend years just trying to get their name out there, so for awhile...it's in their interest to have their work shared if it's not selling like hot cakes on day one.

Once they become more established and known, then the sharing will have more of an impact on their income.


Basically, starting out...without a name they are going to be lucky if people even consider reading their stuff. Lots of guys go a decade before they get to where they can make a living off their work. It's quicker now to pass your work around, but there also a lot more competition with the digital age. A fairly active self-published author whose been tracking his progression on his blog for years says that a writer's best effort for advertisement is writing more books. So that the chance of you being featured on Amazon or some other digital offering is higher, and that you have the ability to offer one of your older books for greatly reduced prices or even free to pick up new readers who may go on to buy your products. It's one of those scenarios that you're kinda damned if you do, damned if you don't on both sides of the equation. Customer can't buy every authors books nor read them all, so free might be what it takes to get your foot in the door with them. However authors can't make a living giving away all their stuff to get noticed, but they may never get enough of a notice to make a living off of their work without giving it away at some point to pick up reviews and word of mouth.


An author, their feelings on the issue is going to vary greatly depending on their success. If they've been at it for years, they might be happy to pick up the extra eye balls from someone spreading their work around. Where as someone like King probably takes a much dimmer view on it. But there's been an up swing in complaints from publishers about libraries and how much they pay for digital stuff, so all that complaining kinda becomes white noise after awhile despite how valid their complaints may be...because every industry seems to be complaining about "lost sales" with some astronomical number to attach to it.

I wanted him to keep going. What are the new incentive structures we need?

Looks like I'll have to go download his book to find out...