Ange Andrianavalona. Author, Illustrator, Painter

photo by Matthias Mehldau

A quote from Steven Poole on his article Free Your Mind : On writers, ‘digital rights management’, and the internet.
Steven Poole has made the experience of giving away his new book as a free PDF download.
He shares the results, his thoughts, pros and cons of this system for content providers.

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Summary of the results : poor results in terms of revenues, good results in terms of publicity
…Clearly this is not any kind of business plan. Still, some people insist that all creative work ought to be given away like this. Several idealistic types in the comments here welcomed my giveaway as reflecting the true spirit of the free dissemination of knowledge. Although I quite admire this sentiment as a utopian principle, I have some problems with it in the real world. Because, you see, this is what I do for a living.

Although I dislike the word “professional”, hostage in this day and age to multifarious abuses, I am a professional writer, in the sense that writing, and only writing, is what puts a roof over my head and food in my mouth.2 As one commenter here suggested, maybe it’s the term “copyright” itself that rubs people the wrong way: perhaps reactions would be different were it changed to “righttoeat”.

If the breathless advocates of “the free distribution of ideas” are serious, they need either a) to come up with a realistic proposal as to how I am to keep feeding myself while giving the fruits of my labours away for free; or b) come out and say honestly that they don’t think any such thing as a “professional writer” ought to exist, and that I should just get a job like anyone else.3 In a way, I’d respect people who came out and said the second thing. What I don’t respect is people who can’t see that those are the choices.

Read more on Steve Poole’s blog

Thoughts Posted on 28 février 2009 by Ange