Zonulet

Based on the prose of the DroneXL piece, I think it would be more accurate to say that Claude adds its own angle.

I am an author, I'm published by one of the publishers involved, and I'm very happy that they're doing it.

I am an author in the middle of my career. I make my living on book sales. Personally I would prefer not to gamble my survival on this airy assumption that "people would figure it out".

Why are you making the assumption that giving our books away for free doesn't affect our sales?

I think your maths is off. A literary novel is a success if it sells 10,000 copies in hardback. I'm pretty sure that doesn't entail getting the book in front of a hundred million people.

I don't understand where you're getting the idea that books are something "no one will pay for". Sales of books are generally stable or rising. They are not like buggy whips.

I also don't understand how it is that you're describing books as "the most precious products of human toil", but you're simultaneously saying you're happy to sacrifice them if it means you get copyright reform.

And I also don't understand how copyright law is screwing up your "technology". It screws up your ability to get certain things for free. But if someone wants to create a DRM-free ebook and give it away, they are still perfectly able to do so.

2018 was also the first time in five years that overall revenues fell – 2018 was still better than 2014 and 2015. The idea that we should scuttle the entire publishing industry and switch to Spotify because of these minor fluctuations from year to year prove the "business model is dying" is absolutely cockamamie. "Legacy publishing" continues to support the production of great work – that is what counts. (It is also my livelihood as an author, so yes I'm biased.) I shudder at the alternative – say Kindle Unlimited, the closest thing that's been tried to a streaming model, which has worked well for romance novelists and romance readers and pretty much nobody else.

If all book sales were electronic, that might indeed invite a reassessment of publishers' value in securing distribution. But ebooks are only about 20% of book sales (and that figure is not rising).

Here in the UK, if you go to a library and take out a book, the author does get compensated, it's called the Public Lending Right. Apparently in Denmark they've had it since 1941 so I don't think it took ebooks to make it technologically possible.

You're admitting what most anti-copyright people don't want to admit – if instead of bookshops we only had the Emergency Library, certain classes of works would indeed go away, including most good fiction, not to mention history, biography, reportage etc. You say that's "just what happens" like it's some ineluctable natural process, but none of this is preordained. The traditional model has a lot of defenders – including the majority of readers who are still happy to pay for books – and with those defenders' help it can survive.

In the UK, revenue from ebook sales grew 3% between 2018 and 2019. Where is your evidence that the business model of "counting copies" – i.e. selling books to people who want to read them – doesn't work any more?

The percentages aren't particularly relevant to me, because I live off advances, not royalties. Sales are still meaningful, because they help determine what advance I get next time, but in my case the idea that I'm getting a cut of each one is basically just symbolic – I've already been paid. Just one of many reasons I could never have had the same career without my "legacy" publisher.

(I should note that your percentages are way off, by the way – in the US I "get" 25% of the cover price for digital and between 7.5% and 25% for physical depending on the edition.)

I am an author and I making my living from book sales. You're right, I'm absolutely obsessed with money, in the sense that I need money to buy food and pay my electricity bill.

This exists in the UK, it's called Unbound. They've been around for ten years and they've done... fine. Some decent books. But their business model has not exactly conquered the world. As an author myself, I would never consider defecting from my "legacy" publisher to a service like that, because my publisher has been extremely valuable to me.

No, this is just my point. Among people on message boards, for whom copyright is oppression and piracy is second nature, paying for media is a voluntary donation. For the average person in the world I am selling my books to, that is not yet the case. They are in the habit of getting stuff the legit way – it's not worth dealing with something a bit complicated and icky when ebooks are pretty good value for money anyway.

Surely this is exactly why the Emergency Library has had such a rapturous reception! Because it's exactly what I described – an (apparently) legit, feel-good, well-publicised, reasonably simple way to get any book you want for free. That has not existed before. Otherwise why would anyone care?

I can assure you there are a lot of great books that would not have been written if the authors first had to either 1. become beloved enough on the internet that they could crowdfund their income for five years or 2. somehow secure a "wealthy patron" who wanted to finance it (I can imagine a pretty fierce competition for that pretty rare beast).

Once this change is made, won't somebody just start a website that looks exactly like the Amazon Kindle Store except everything is free to download, and it's legal? You don't think that will hurt our sales at all? I know people online think "Anyone who pays for a piece of media is essentially making a voluntary donation because they could so easily pirate it if they wanted", but that actually isn't true in the real world. Making it legal, convenient and non-shady to get stuff for free would change a lot of people's behaviour.

Right, but authors getting a shitty percentage from their publishers is a complaint that's literally as old as publishing itself, it has nothing to do with the model being "obsolete" because of the internet. If it was really that bad, we would all have defected to Amazon already, but we haven't because most of us hugely prefer our publishers to the alternative.

Wait, I thought the argument from the anti-copyright people was supposed to be that piracy doesn't hurt sales, not that piracy takes away livelihoods?

Every author who's published by a traditional publisher will agree with you that the system has problems, but I guarantee you won't find many who think the whole thing needs to be scrapped and turned into Spotify or OnlyFans or whatever you think the new model is going to look like. Otherwise you would already see a lot more established authors defecting! The truth is the current system, for all its faults, supports the production of a lot of wonderful work, and generally people want to get into it, not out of it.

What are your options if your book is going to take years of work and you don't already have a following?

Business models like self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited have worked really well for romance and fantasy novelists who can publish six books a year and have fans who plough through two books a week. They absolutely have not worked for literary novelists, let alone historians, biographers etc. If the "sell copies of books to readers" model dies, it will change the kinds of books that get written. For people who see books as a fungible commodity – any book is about as good as any other – that's fine. For the rest of us, it isn't.

>I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years.

I am an author in the UK. Revenue from digital book sales – i.e. what you would call "paying a toll for copying a file" and what I would call people buying books they want to read – went up 3% between 2018 and 2019. I'm not sure sales increasing is very good evidence for a business model having been "obsolete for years". Sure, there a lot of serious problems with the publishing industry, but if this is the "pain" I'm "prolonging" then I think I can endure it for a little bit longer.

Actually as an author I am very sympathetic to what happened to musicians and I desperately hope it doesn't happen to us too.

I am a small time author myself. If someone gives away a pirated copy of one of my books for free, but includes a readme inviting people to buy the book, I do not feel they are 'minimising the impact on me'. In fact I do not feel that makes any difference whatsoever. The best way for them to minimise the impact on me would be to not give away my book in the first place.

This isn't really about Neil Gaiman, this is about the vast majority of small-time authors who work incredibly hard for every sale and who rely on paying readers to be able to continue with their careers.

I am an author with three books on there, and I've just emailed them to opt out. One reason authors are fine with libraries lending out their books for free, electronically or otherwise, is that borrowing a library copy is always a little bit less convenient than buying your own – with waits for availability and so on – which gives readers an incentive to pay if they can afford it. Once the library experience is almost indistinguishable from the paid experience, there is no reason for anyone to pay except as a kind of donation to the author. Yes, some generous people will choose to do this, but others won't, and we lose sales.

I am a mid-list author. I am not so successful that I will do fine whatever happens, nor am I so unsuccessful that writing is just a weekend hobby for me. Like many authors, writing is my career, but it's on a knife edge, and every sale counts. I've sat for an hour at a signing table just to sell four books, and I would again.

I spent five years working on my last book. People complain about 'legacy publishers', but I couldn't have done that without the support of a legacy publisher. Everything that further chips away at my sales reduces the chances that my publisher will be able to support me in the future, and so it reduces the chances that I will be able to put that same time and effort into another book. By 'liberating' the literature of today, these people are strangling the literature of the future.

They tried this, it was called Kindle Unlimited and it turned out to be terrible for most authors.