You
have just bought an e-book reader or a tablet device and enjoy the
reading experience. You appreciate that it can actually fit thousands
of books which you can now take with you anywhere from your night
table to Timbuktu. Now you want to get books to put in it. You've
discovered that you can download most books published before 1922 for
free from places like Gutenberg. Great, but you can't spend the rest
of your life reading Pride
and Prejudice
or Great
Expectations.
You want to get on to people like Faulkner, Orwell, Hemingway. Let's
say you want to read Hemingway's The
Old Man and the Sea.
You look it up in Amazon and you discover that something is wrong
with the prices. They are selling a 72 page paperback for $8.50 and
the e-book for $11.59.
It
doesn't make sense, does it? An e-book does not need paper or
printing, it doesn't require a warehouse, and it has no
transportation costs. It doesn't need a physical store to be sold in
or staff to sell it to you. It's sold directly to the customer
through an e-store. Hemingway's share couldn't be more than 10-15%,
yet the publisher finds it necessary to boost his price a further
36%. What are his extra expenses?
I
am sure that if the publisher is asked, he will come up with
something, like all the electricity his server is eating up. But we
weren't born yesterday. Face it: chances are we are paying for
someone's Lear jet. So we try to find something cheaper. We Google
the title of the book we want and discover that it exists as a
torrent file and we can download it for nothing. But isn't that
unethical or law breaking? Of course it is, and you don't want to
break the law. You want Hemingway to get his share so that he can
support himself and keep writing books for your ancestors in the
after life. But you don't want to pay for someone's Lear jet either.
So what do you do?
Well,
you don't have to be a criminal to know that ethics and laws are
highly regional in space as well as time. For example in 16th
century London it was considered proper to burn someone alive as a
witch to save his soul. Not so today (in London). There is no time
machine available to exploit the time property of legality but hey,
air travel is legal, affordable and safe. Illegal to get an abortion
in Texas? Why do it illegally when you can ride a jetliner and see
Paris or Rome as well! Want to kill another human being? Why risk a
death sentence or life imprisonment when you can join the army and
get to Afghanistan. There, you will discover that not only is it
legal to kill other people, but imperative. The more the better! And
the best part is good old Uncle Sam will pay you to do it!
OK,
you don't find it funny, but you did catch my key phrase: laws are
regional. So you take your smart phone to a country where it is legal
to upload and download e-books. You download thousands legally. You
take them to your country of origin and of course at customs you
declare nothing because you paid nothing to get them! You don't sell
or even give even a single book to anyone, even your closest friend.
You are 100% law abiding and open your e-reader to start reading. And
then you realize that what you have is not Hemingway or Steinbeck but
something else.
I
have explained in my article Change any book to an e-book that
it takes approximately 5 hours to properly convert a 200 page novel
to an e-book. About an hour of that is scanning and computer time.
The remaining 4 hours is proofreading. Over 80% of the books
available out there as torrents for download have been scanned but
not proofread. What makes Hemingway or Steinbeck great is his exact
choice of words. If you have a copy of a book that is missing words
(or entire paragraphs), or has misspelled words you don't have
Hemingway. You have something that's worth nothing.
Which
is exactly what you've paid for it!
But
we all know that the world we live in is hardly fair, or maybe it is.
Well, whichever way you look at it, it turns out that you can get the
real book for nothing. And this will be the subject of Part II: Everything for Nothing.
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