I agree that funding for otherwise unknown authors is necessary for high quality books, and I agree that more sales mean more money around to fund "risky" authors.

But I'd rather see funding work a bit like science, where you ask a non-profit for funding based on a project proposal that's judged more on its merits than on its sales potential. No author would need an "X Twitter followers" pre-requisite anymore.

And then there's the counterpart, namely, reach: when I studied Japanese in South America the only textbook available in Spanish were photocopies sold (illegally, of course) by the University of the only original they had - with such a small market and highly devaluated currency, no bookstore imported the book anymore. Had it not been for piracy, none of us could have studied. And it would have been poor consolation to know that our sacrifice in not pirating a book would have led to better books somewhere else that we also wouldn't be able to afford.

Are project proposals not sales pitches? Isn't this what everyone in academia complains about? Having to "sexy" up science so they can sell it to people (get other people to pay for it)?

Sure but nobody would suffer if say a new fantasy novel was not available there.

> Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free.

I would argue this is more or less already the case.

Stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'.

Piracy is a violent penal crime that often results in murder and property theft. Copyright infringement we are talking about is just copying digits.

Modern pirates are economically disenfranchised people (usually sustinance fishermen) that have had their livelihoods stolen by international conglomerates.

Even with the the murders, etc, they are multiple steps up the ethical food chain from slaver fishing ships, which are apparently totally legit businesses (TM) in the global economy.

I really don't see the problem with the term "piracy". I guess if you are a vegan and also 100% boycott Asia you might be able to cast a stone against 21st century pirates.

That pirate ship has sailed.

If we use words to refer to things they don't mean, words will lose their meaning.

Who decides the meaning? You?

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Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum - 2nd edition - London 1736

Pirate: one who lives by pillage and robbing on the sea. Also a plagiary.

https://books.google.ch/books?id=O50-AAAAcAAJ&pg=PT181&lpg=P...

---

Daniel Defoe's The True-Born Englishman - First published in 1701, the quote below is from the explanatory preface added in a 1703 edition

Had I wrote it for the gain of the press, I should have been concerned at its being printed again, and again, by pirates, as they call them

http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm

This site really isn't news for hackers, either...

> This site really isn't news for hackers, either...

I would consider this actually to be a serious point. Indeed there exist people who complain that the focus of Hacker News has shifted from what it was in the past.

I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two. Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to talk about how the community has changed, typically in a derogatory manner.

This is perfectly explainable: Very often, early adaptors of, say, communities are a very different breed of people than people who join the community in a later phase.

So, it is the behaviour to expect that sooner or later these early adaptors that lead to the initial growth of the community won't feel home anymore.

See also Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

There's that, and there's also the tendency for humans to feel nostalgia for a time that never was. Memories are poor. I suspect if people were asked to guess whether a thread was from today or 2008, they'd get a lot wrong (aside from chronological details giving clues).

You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe copyright theft.

Just because some clever PR campaign launched by the copyright lobby succeeded in equating harmless act of copying files to a violent dangerous crime, it doesn't mean we should perpetrate forever this substitution of concepts.

Why is this pedantry relevant to the original point? I don't understand what you're driving towards.

What difference does it make if it is copyright infringement or 'piracy'?

We're talking about incentives for authors and how they can fund their risk/time for publishing a book.

Because the main source of ire of book authors is that they lose some part of the revenue from book sales due to copyright infringement, which many call piracy.

Now, piracy is an incorrect and am emotionally charged term to describe this phenomenon. I believe that a productive discussion on any matter requires clarity of chosen terms. Piracy is not one such term when talking about something not related to sea and ships.

Feel free to call it whatever you want. I will call it piracy because most people do.

EDIT: Interestingly, the first recorded usage of "pirate" to imply copyright infringement is from 1913, talking about "pirate broadcasts".

Pirate publishers were a thing well before that:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.28173/

Wow! I took the 1913 date from the Etymology dictionary, so I'm surprised it goes back another 100 years before that.

It goes back even more, it predates copyright.

https://books.google.ch/books?id=jFMEPUO7LS0C&lpg=PP1&hl=de&...

> Purchase books. Please.

The people who download lots of books illegally are often also the biggest buyers of books.

Given that any book can now be preserved and reproduced indefinitely, and given that there's only so much reading one man can do in his life, shouldn't there be a point when we have enough books and don't need any new ones? We might have reached that point already.

The same argument works for HN comments.

Yeah, it has all been downhill from Gutenberg. Why did I learn to write?