Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
I’m an indie author, and all my novels ended up on PDFdrive.
Not that I’d be mad about it. If someone pirates my books and likes them, maybe they’ll support me in the future.
Just saying, I’m not wearing suits. I’m working full-time and write when I have off and got the time and energy.
For us Indies, getting eyeballs on our books is next to impossible anyways, so I already gave up on the idea that writing will ever be more than an expensive hobby.
Yep! Often the math is “the people who pirated probably wouldn’t have bought your product if they couldn’t pirate it, so you didn’t lose anything. But you did gain a reader, who can now recommend it to others, and / or make future purchases themselves”. Generally speaking, pirating isn’t bad to the bottom line (not saying it’s good).
It hurts brick and mortar stores, but then, so do libraries. (Hah)
I’ve always been of the opinion that people who truly love what they piratesd will at some point want the author to carry on writing. Just like someone who just stumbled upon your work by accident. That’s the beauty of humanity, people do remember, and they do care, and creative arts are a pursuit that connects author and reader.
libraries are not comparable to what damage piracy does to brick and mortar stores and small authors
Piracy does not damage at all compared to the damage monopolized america is doing to them.
That was a joke about how much capitalists hate socialist libraries.
If we had any sense as a species we would be funding artists so that they can pursue their art full time. Industry advances technology, but art advances the mind.
We might end up like people who do graphics… replaced by AI tools. There aren’t any that make it as easy yet (and maybe there won’t), but who knows where tech will lead us.
If you do it as a hobby, you don’t need to worry about it so much, but it does take something away for sure.
AI will change the game, but I think after an initial period of growing pains that we’re really facing a shift in the economy whether we’re ready or not. All of the “problems” of capitalism have been due to runaway efficiency. A scarcity economy is absurd when we’re infinitely capable of producing everything people want or need.
I agree, and the optimist in me desperately wants to experience a post-scarcity society like the one we’re seeing in the The Culture books, where AIs run the world, and we humans are free to chase whatever it is we’re dreaming of.
Maybe that’s a romantic notion, but I’m hesitant to give up on in. Dreams are what’s kept us going for the past millennia.
You might become bored and depression does seem to be more common when you do not have a particular sense of purpose.
I like the idea as well but human psychology might not be so conductive to easy living.
What do you mean when you say we need a purpose?
We are biologically designed to reproduce. So our current purpose is to survive until we’re grown to sexual maturity, reproduce, then raise our offspring to a stage where they’re able to survive on their own. Then, we either do it again, if we’re still young enough, or die and make room for the next generation. That seems like a very depressing purpose to me, but this is how evolution works.
I think that we now have the intellectual capacity to transcendent this cycle. We’ve been for a while, and we formed societies, developed technology. Our first models were small tribes, very much hippie-like little communities, that suffered from attrition by tribe warfare and rule of the strongest, where reproduction was controlled by “the fittest”. Then we developed monarchic systems that provided a much more stable life for everyone, but ran on servitude (slavery) of peasants. We experimented with systems like communism, that then lead to terror by the ruling class (can still see that in China today), and landed on a somewhat democracy-adjacent system of capitalism that we’re running today, and that’s not sustainable, because we’re destroying our planet.
What’s next, and what purpose for the individual do you have in mind?
You don’t need a purpose and in fact most of the purpose people identify with are rather unnecessary for lack of better word. But people without some feeling of purpose are definately more prone to depression. Countries like Mexico should be less happy being people have far less wealth and have to work harder but the opposite it true. I find people are overall more happy and content. Now I would normal discount my experiences as being limited but if you look at the suicide rate of say the US to Mexico, the US has 4 times the rate.
This is actually true for nearly every developed to developing nations and I think speaks a great deal about human nature.
Okay, so what you’re saying is that you think friction creates a sense of purpose. That might be true. People in Mexico are probably more happy about little things and enjoy them more, because that’s what they have. Less freedom of choice paradox to contend with, and less free time to sink into depression (I believe in “the olden times”, people were just too tired from fighting to survive to sit down and have an existential crisis). That sounds like a valid idea and is supporting your point.
The question is, how can we combine my (borrowed from the Culture series) idea of a post scarcity society with your idea of a psychological need for friction? Do you think it’s impossible to simulate the same feeling of need for something to result in the same strain that then causes happiness?
You mean, being forced to find your own meaning instead of just going down a socially acceptable to-do list?
Boredom is simply a lack of imagination and drugs.
Honestly drugs lose their luster eventually and most people whos life resolve around them daily are often pretty uninteresting.
You seem fun at parties.
(No, not really.)
Just like the invention of the camera stopped people painting portraits.
I am sorry to hear that. If it ended up on pdf drive, then I guess it’s either that, enough people want to read it or pdf drive has a bot which is ruthlessly uploading all the books it can find. Have you tried self publishing on kindle? Also, name your books if you want to, it looks like some eyeballs and popularity will do you some good.
I tried on Kindle, but the reality is that every day, a six-digit number of books are being released, which leads to insane odds.
I wrote cyberpunk/urban fantasy crossover books, but am now switching over to space opera. If you’re still interested, I can give you the title of the “entry book” that starts the story.
Shadowrun?
No, I’m not writing Shadowrun, but the genre has some similarities.
Agreed. I can say that personally I went back and bought a lot of music that I copied off of my friends’ ipods as a kid. I’m sure it isn’t the norm to go back and buy stuff, but it happens.