When a friend first sent me a link relating to Brazilian author Paulo Coelho's phenomenal book sales despite online piracy of his works--in fact, despite his active promotion of piracy of his works--I was very intrigued. This sentiment has obviously stayed with me up till now, and I thought this class was an opportune time to explore the subject.

So why is online piracy bad? Traditional piracy was bad because it necessarily excluded. Online piracy is different--it doesn't exclude. So there's a distinction between traditional piracy and online piracy. Is online piracy, then, so to speak, a misnomer? In some sense, online "piracy" is not really "piracy".

The next thing is cost. Why do traditional books cost? Publishing, producing the physical book. And since online piracy rids us of the middlemen, ie the publisher, bookbinder, we should pay only the author or artist? So the cost should be dictated only by the mental labor. But how much of the price under the traditional scheme accrues to the author or artist? And how much does the average author earn under the traditional scheme anyway? According to an online comment, 8.5% of the cover price of the book. So that makes some 2 dollars per book sold if we take the average price of 20 dollars per book. But let's say you're a J.K. Rowling--how much would you earn? Would piracy be hugely detrimental to you?

And if we talk about paying for the author's mental labor, then what about library book sales and thrift stores? The earnings don't accrue to authors either. And what if the author is dead? Why should we pay for the work of a person who's dead? Whose labor is it supposed to be then? Why should we pay his estate?

And then again, who really deserves to be paid over and over again based on work they did in the past, often once-off? Why don't we pay architects again and again for the buildings they design that are used repeatedly by different people who inhabit or seek shelter in them?

But in the end, are the earnings or the profit what drives authors? What exactly drives them? What drove the likes of: Tolstoy? Flaubert? Proust? Joyce? Pushkin? Shakespeare? Ultimately, I'm not sure what drives such people is the money--nor should it be. It's about sharing. I think (and it seems that this opinion is shared by artists themselves online) that the main motivation is about sharing, about being appreciated. Coelho said himself that money is the consequence, not the cause. The cause should be an internal compulsion, an inner drive. People say his success is only due to the fact that he was famous to start with, but, to start with, he didn't set out writing to make money through writing.

And even if it isn't the inner drive that motivates the writer, there are other cases that repeat this Coelho phenomenon: Neil Gaiman was actually one of those who feared online piracy at the start, but later he found out that it's good because it's free publicity. http://ruthellenparlour.com/2012/07/16/thinking-differently-about-ebook-piracy/

On top of that, there's the nature of the physical book itself--it's different from music and films. Reading off a screen is just not sustainable. Not to mention the battery life problem.

So why is on-line piracy good? Free publicity. You can on top of this get out-of-print material through piracy (so the demands of the individual consumer are not subject to profit-making or cost-effective considerations). Also, piracy can be a way to winnow out real talent first, then have the text published in traditional book form. Because if something resonates with people, they probably will go out to get the real physical book. Or, to put it the way an online comment put it: If your ideas are good, the money will come. (Maybe not so much for music, but that's because of the inherent differences between the book and the song.) And if they aren't, maybe it's time to just start a blog and get a new job...?

So at the end of the day, maybe my premises were wrong. The question isn't: Why is Paulo Coelho an exception? It's: Is he even an exception?

-- EugeneThong - 12 Oct 2012