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   Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 22:07:23 JST Sandra
   The whole idea that we authors should make money by selling copies of texts, and that the price of those copies should be jacked up by artificial scarcity, has pretty broken in practice.
   
   The gap between the best-seller authors and the second tier is immense. It's not a graduated slope where they sell a tiny bit more.
   
   https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/81637-is-publishing-too-top-heavy.html
   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 22:14:31 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @Sandra As far as I can tell, authors could make money by selling physical books of texts and access to digital copies, if it wasn't for publishers very carefully ensuring that authors are pretty much forced to go through them and hand over their copyright for the book that they wrote - so the publishers can take all the profit and maybe leave some scraps for the author(s) that wrote the book in the first place.
     
     It would be good if there was a non-proprietary transaction "platform", where purchasers and sellers alike could make transactions without everything getting stolen by middlemen.
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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 22:36:28 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @Sandra Limiting access to digital copies?
     
     Ideally the digital book would have a free license on it, so one can choose to either pay the author for a copy, or get a copy from someone else.
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     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 22:36:29 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • 翠星石

     @Suiseiseki

     As far as I can tell, authors could make money by selling physical books of texts and access to digital copies

     I’m not very happy with that setup. Not only are book sales top-heavy as that post shows, the entire idea of limiting access to digital copies goes against the pay-it-forward cornucopia of mittens and socks: https://idiomdrottning.org/mittens

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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 22:44:48 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @Sandra My mistake, I didn't write "selling access to freely licensed digital copies", as I forget that "selling access" typically means paying to be shackled by digital handcuffs.
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     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 22:44:49 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     @Suiseiseki
     
     Selling access to digital copies is what you said.
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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 23:27:26 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @Sandra >We need new ways to put food on the table
     I would suggest maybe getting seeds cheaply and planting crops and getting chickens - doing so is reasonably cheap provided you have access to some land and you might be able to fund that from selling floppy disks of GNU software even.
     
     That isn't very convenient or easy, but you did get food on the table (but nothing else).
     
     >I'm not eager to join up some pyramid scheme lottery where we all buy floppies or LiberaPay subscriptions
     There's no way to make a payment with "Libre"Pay without running proprietary software, so I will never use it unless that's fixed.
     
     >UBI, crowdfunding, there's a bunch of ways.
     It would be entirely possible to make farming arrangements in such a way that nobody has to worry about food unless there's overpopulation, but that won't happen, as food companies got to get that profit.
     
     >Or we can radically reimagine the way humans distribute tasks and resources by thinking way out of the box.
     That works fine for software, as copying has zero marginal cost and that sort of sharing happens often with free software.
     
     Trying to apply that to physical things is sadly not very likely to succeed, as most humans are not rational actors and are perfectly capable of being so greedy that they end up ruining everything.
   • Embed this notice
     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 23:27:27 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     @Suiseiseki
     
     We need new ways to put food on the table beyond the traditional GNU floppy disk yard sale model. That's not gonna go very far. And I'm not eager to join up some pyramid scheme lottery where we all buy floppies or LiberaPay subscriptions from each other hoping to eke out dinner and a place to sleep.
     
     UBI, crowdfunding, there's a bunch of ways. Or we can radically reimagine the way humans distribute tasks and resources by thinking way out of the box. Again, see https://idiomdrottning.org/mittens
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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 23:36:12 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @Sandra I read the link, I'm not sure what you're on about.
     
     Copyright on its own doesn't create artificial scarcity, but the government and proprietary software developers wielding proprietary licenses does.
     
     I write about free software only, as I refuse to fall for the proprietary trick known as "FOSS".
     
     It's not 1983, but it does get closer to 1984 with every passing day.
   • Embed this notice
     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 23:36:13 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     @Suiseiseki
     
     Yeah, duh. I literally wrote as much in that link you're refusing to read 🤦🏻♀️
     
     "It’s ridiculous to impose artificial scarcity where there is no need for scarcity. The Earth is a multifaceted thing and there are areas where there are scarcity, which we need to carefully manage (or systematically manage), and there are areas where there isn’t scarcity and it’s evil to create and impose it."
     
     Not into someone jumping into my threads to re-explain FOSS basics in tedious detail as if it was 1983.
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     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 23:43:55 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @Sandra The GPLv3 takes copyright and gives the right to make copies to everyone, while also forbidding the implementation of artificial scarcity.
     
     If you manage to release something correctly into the public domain (good luck with that really, this currently-incomplete declaration is the closest we're going to get once it's ready https://wpdd.info/), the problem is that unless no-one learns of the work, a business is going to take the work and apply artificial scarcity to it.
     
     Therefore, the only way to ensure artificial scarcity doesn't happen it to license copyleft under copyright.
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     Sandra (sandra@idiomdrottning.org)'s status on Monday, 18-Sep-2023 23:43:57 JST Sandra

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     @Suiseiseki
     
     Copyright as in "the exclusive right to make copies" is artificial scarcity.