Brett Paul Dunbar wrote:
Sebastien Blondeel <blondeel@clipper.ens.fr> writes
Whilst it may be true that most books are written by part-time writers, it is also true that hardly anyone reads most books.
If you look at it on sales per copy, that's fine. However, please take a look at this article from Wired called "The Long Tail" which has many statistics on how the sales of all those hundreds of thousands of "unpopular" books actually match up with sales of the most popular books. There may only be a few readers of each but there's significant profit made (by some people, at least) on all those unpopular books: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
I expect that most books read are written by full-time writers, or writers who could be full-time if they chose to be. e.g. books by Terry Pratchett make up about 1% of UK fiction sales, the impact on the supply of good fiction if he still had to have a day-job would be significant, as he would not be able to write nearly as many books.
Here you make the most erroneous assumption: that less restrictive copyright laws would force Terry Pratchett to get a day job. Assuming Copyright was as it was in the U.S. Constitution (14 years with an optional extension for a total of 28), Terry Pratchett would still be earning money from his last 28 years of writing. Take this in the context that he started writing "full time" in 1987.
So less copyright "protection" would not mean less creation. And this "support the artist" idea is bogus: 1/ most artists don't benefit from it
Most artists don't benefit from it because most of them just aren't much good, so few people read their books.
Wait, wait, wait. The artistic merits of a book have very little to do with how many copies they sell.
Don't deprive millions of readers for the sake of a relatively small number who want to read poor quality older books. The really good stuff, the stuff people are actually interested in reading, tends to stay in print.
I see, now it's "older" books that're of poor quality. Why is this? Is literature undergoing some miraculous transformation which causes all older books to be of poorer quality? With less restrictive copyright laws in place (I suggest 14 years + 14 years), all authors capable of selling enough copies of a book for them to make a living out of, would still be able to do it. Copyright was not created (in the U.S.) in order to ensure a never-ending payday for authors (and, more importantly, publishers!) -- it was created to encourage more creation than would otherwise happen. Going back to Anne's analogy, if you're a plumber and you do one year of amazingly good work, you're paid for one year. Authors, on the other hand, seem to think that for one year of work, they should be paid until seventy years after the end of their lives. I know I'm not the only person who think that's unreasonable. Cheers, Holden