Please don’t pirate books at least while the author is alive. I’ll make an exception for actual billionaires and wildly expensive textbooks you cannot afford yet need to complete your studies. I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone. I don’t know how many people realise how many writers who created successful, beloved stories and characters still die poor while other people get rich off the same work. I don’t think people realise that in the UK the current average yearly earnings for an author has nosedived over the last fifteen years to £10,500. That obviously is forcing people to quit writing. It increasingly means writing is a job for people who’ve inherited money or have wealthy spouses who can support them. I don’t know if people realise that in general, writers are poor and getting poorer. I’m sorry, but if you think widespread sense of entitlement to free books has nothing to do with that … you’re just wrong.
I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care. That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.
Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again. John Brownlow NK Jemisin Michael Marshall Smith Me Marina Lostetter Kari Dru and others William Gibson and others
There are plenty of others. It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em.
Like. If you want to radically change society in such a way that mass-media conglomerates don’t exist and so can’t exploit us and we’re supported to make art in some other way than fine. But can you start the revolution with actual rich people please, not ask us to live right now, in the society we’ve got, without the money we need to survive it. Finally, a plea: I really, really, do not want to debate this. This whole thing genuinely makes me feel tense and shaky and sick. If you’ve got to disagree - unfollow me, block me, vagueblog somewhere I can’t see it. The Twitter version of this already has me feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut. I didn’t want to write this post. I just felt I wasn’t going to have any peace until I did.
If you don’t want to buy a book outright, please consider getting it from your local public library (or your school library if you’re a student). If the library does not have the book you want, you can usually make a purchase suggestion and the collections staff will consider if it’s possible to procure the item based on availability and budget, or you can just do an interlibrary loan request and the library will try to get a copy on loan for you from another library system. In some libraries I’ve worked for, the ILL staff will actually look at the cost of the item, and if it’s under a certain amount, they’ll automatically just buy it instead of requesting it, because it’s cheaper and involves less work.
Libraries are a great middle ground if you can’t afford to pay for a book but don’t want to pirate the material, and a lot of libraries use apps like Libby/Overdrive and Borrow Box so that there are also materials online.
Publishing companies will use book piracy (ie lack of sale numbers) to excuse paying us even less, so it’s not just our published books we lose money on, it’s our future advances. To put an extremely blunt end on it: the books I wrote on a 6 figure advance (the money was spread out over three years, so it was still >$80K/year) are much better than the books I write at $40K (not just because I have to cram to get that split over 2 years instead of 3, and since $20K/year isn’t enough, I have to get another contract).
The corporations don’t care if you pirate books. It actually *helps* them. But it sure screws writers over.