Get Your Book, Make It Free
Am I the only one who feels that authors should be paid for their work? I&#x27;ll go a step further and say that I think that authors offering up their work for free hurts the entire ecosystem, since it gives consumers the expectation that information is free.<p>Look at phone apps as an example. We&#x27;ve gotten to a point that many (maybe most) people won&#x27;t pay $5 for a high quality game that they get hours of usage out of. So the savviest (in terms of making money) developers make games with a freemium model, giving you a basic game for free, but charging you for extras and add-ons. On the face of it, this is fine, since Jack can decide to make a freemium game and Jill can make her game paid. The problem is that Jill now lives in a world where free games are so much the norm that without incredible marketing power, people won&#x27;t even take a look at her.<p>The same thing has taken hold in much of the software we use. It&#x27;s hard to get my boss to agree to pay $300 for a non-open source, but really nifty JS library, because there&#x27;s an inferior version available for free. Another example is Matlab, which is paid software but is slowly losing marketshare to Python for scientific computing (numpy&#x2F;scipy). I personally prefer the latter, but when I tried out the former in grad school, I was impressed with how well Matlab was documented and that I could reach out to them and get quick answers if things weren&#x27;t working as I expected them to (hint: in python&#x2F;scipy, things were often a little bit off in the code. With matlab, it was usually something <i>I</i> was doing. But it&#x27;s very helpful to have a paid expert get back to me and tell me that). It&#x27;s a shame that people have gotten so used to free software that they often won&#x27;t consider paid software anymore.<p>I get that for things that involve security, you might want to be able to audit things. And I also think that we 100% need some things to be open standards decided on by the community. I&#x27;m not <i>against</i> free software, I&#x27;m against people not being able to make a living writing paid software. Or someone spending a lot of time writing a great piece of paid software only for someone to come along and immediately copy them with a free version.<p>I don&#x27;t think that the same thing has taken hold yet with books. By and large, people are still willing to pay for these. But I sure hope it stays that way.<p>EDIT: I agree with many that the length of copyrights is ridiculous. I like the idea of copyright generally, but I think that we need to strike a balance where producing information is rewarded but has its limits. I don&#x27;t know what the answer should be, but life of author plus 70 years (current rule in the US) seems a bit excessive.<p>EDIT 2: To show where we area potentially headed, look no further than newspapers. How many newspapers that exist today are going to be viable over the next 20 years? Even local newspapers in major cities are struggling because people today have the expectation that news should be free. I think that there are interesting proposals for government funding that would allow citizens to allocate a share of funds to media outlets of their choice. I haven&#x27;t really given these much thought. But absent something like that, the future is going to be filled with a small number of big players plus a lot of tabloids, eyeball grabbing headlines, and outright fake news.