How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it?
I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.
In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks.
In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the pocket, in a profession it’s already hard to make a living from.
(I wish we’d figured out a better way to organise book publishing without publishing companies getting in the way and taking their large slice, allowing authors to profit more directly.)
In his words: “My experience has been that readers want to support things they like … But if they are at a point in their lives where they can’t, then it’s better to let them read the stories they want … and let them support artists when they’re capable of it. So I am a big fan of giving away books for free.”
Source: https://www.jotdown.es/2016/12/brandon-sanderson-i-want-to-s...
For example, if you pirated an ebook and liked it, you'd likely buy a physical copy.
It's easy to add a "me too" onto the existing list but that's not my point. I think we generally can expect better from the average person than we instinctively do. If 50% of people are just as honest as we are (if we're average persons which, on average, we are), that would be easily worth it if free distribution of a book gets you a 3x bigger reach as compared to when people have to pay up front. I'm not aware of research confirming or refuting this (of course I'd like to believe that information can be free), but it doesn't seem so outlandish to me that we can ignore the option altogether by doing a sniff test
EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com)
280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments
I would suspect A pirates book B and tells C about it, C buys book B is a lot more common than A pirates book B and likes it enough to buy it
I have no data to support this, and while I have paid for things I could access for free, but I'm sufficiently pessimistic about human nature to think that's the norm.
Most people who are able to, still pay for things, especially if they're convenient. Even when those services actually add additional restrictions to their access to the media they think they're paying for.
Bold. Not inherently incorrect, but not optimally heuristic.
It's completely different for a writer who gets their income from sales of their work, obviously