Posts by Paul Litterick
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Downloaders won't go away, no matter how much people try. That genie is out of the bottle, and cannot be returned. Better to figure out how to entice people to buy instead of download than to fight the losing battle of winding back the clock.
I would not call them pirates because it gives glamour to what is no more than theft. You entice away to your heart's content, but some people will always want stuff for nothing, and employ a battery of self-serving arguments (copyright is theft, torrenting is fighting the Man, etc) to justify their cupidity. Apparently, it is a fundamental human right to have broadband, whatever purposes to which one puts it. Meanwhile, the legitimate owners of the media which is being stolen must change to accommodate the thieves.
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"The first draft for instance was completely historical. With historical fiction what you traditionally get is the history as background but I wasn't happy with that because as a Maori writer detail is important to me and so therefore making sure that detail wasn't background but fully integrated into the whole novel itself is what I was attempting."
In short, the Iwi made me do it.
I am impressed by the way in which Ihimaera combines the Argument from Indigenousness with PoMo variations; what we end up with is in fact a very, very exciting new approach to talking utter bollocks.
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that is the entire extent of your position: That things can be downloaded for free, thus there is no paying market for those goods. That's crap, and I've proved it.
There you go again, making strawmen. Perhaps I was not paying attention when you proved the argument which I did not make was wrong.
My argument is that things are downloaded free, that some folks may pay for stuff but many others do not. It is wrong to take other folks' stuff. Copyright is not a form of serfdom but the means by which artists can protect their productions and earn income from them.
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...one could argue that fine art auctions demonstrate that there absolutely is a perfectly-functioning free market in expression of ideas.
One could so argue, but one would expose oneself as a fool by doing so. Perhaps one should attend an auction or so; perhaps one should see how the art market works.
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What the hell is with you, and Paul, and your incessant repetition of the "downloaded for free" mantra?
Torrents, dear boy, torrents.
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What mistakes did the movie and music industries make? The shifting reality they are fighting against is one where people with broadband expect to be able to download movies and music without paying for them, yet still expect the industries to continue producing the product. If the hospitality industry were run on the same lines - if people could wander into pubs and take whatever drinks they wanted without paying - it would all be over by Christmas.
And what mistakes is the book industry making? E-books may well cost a fraction of a cent if they are out of copyright and the text is readily available, but will cost more if royalties and editing costs are involved, as well as those of finding and marketing new authors. Why would the industry bother if some kid in Norway is going to find a way of hacking the technology to get the books for nothing?
Besides, books are more than just texts. They are objects, with high production values that e-books cannot emulate. Reading a book is also a particular kind of experience, that is different from reading on a screen.
I am reading the Norton Critical Edition of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. It comes in paperback, with the text, illustrations of the locations in the novel, contemporary reviews and critical essays. I am also using a Project Gutenberg transcription to search for key words, for my academic work. The book is much superior to the electronic text, but the electronic text is much easier to use for searching. So I search online and read at leisure. The experience of reading online is not only less pleasant, but the bare text is less informative than the published book.
I think many advocates of e-books are not book lovers, and they make the mistake of thinking of books as mere data.
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People like reading and owning books, made from dead tree and obtainable from all good book shops. Authors like it that people like that.
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So, I come back and the room is full of strawmen. Matthew, you have been busy.
To address one point you made that everyone else will have forgotten:
Getting people exposed to a quality product, which they then recognise as being of utility to them, is not the same as creating a new market. The market for books is not new. The market for fantasy books is not new either. The market for books based on the vampire myth is, clearly, not a new market, because the readers were very likely already reading fantasy books. Rather, there is a new interest in supplying an under-serviced market.
No. Vampire books are a long established genre. Vampires with feelings are not. Interview with a Vampire probably started this sub-genere; Buffy certainly made it cool; Twilight took it to a new audience, teenage girls. It is not a new interest in supplying an under-serviced market, but a new market.
That is all; please carry on with whatever you were talking about.
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But merely to recognise that there are customers for a genre is not to create those customers.
No, but neither is a market merely a section of the population. The A&R man knows the demographic for the type of music he is marketing. They can be relied upon to buy a certain amount of product, from the A&R man's company and its competitors. But the A&R man can increase sales by getting people interested in something they might not have thought of buying. World Music is an example: twenty-five years ago music fans would not have thought of buying music sung in languages other than English, but the likes of Charlie Gillett created a market.
Another example is Public Address books. PA readers obviously are literate; they probably buy books. But they probably never thought about buying a spoof Reserve Bank annual, until today.
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But they don't make the market -- they see it and respond to it. The market exists whether they decide to serve it or not.
To the extent that 14 year-old girls existed before Twilight, yes. But, so far as I know, those girls were not scouring bookshops looking for novels which represented their feelings in the Vampire genre. The book's success was only possible because it was marketed by gatekeepers: bookshops, the New York Times bestseller list, etc. The book only came to be because it was picked up by an agent (after being rejected by fourteen others) who pitched it to the publishers, eight of which bid for the rights. It is gatekeepers all the way down, and they create markets.