There is little difference between lending a book I own physically to a friend and sending them a copy of an e-book I bought.

Except that there’s no limit to the number of people that can get a free copy.

but then again as a writer, why is more people reading my book a bad thing? Of course, I’m just a part-time little bitty baby writer using smashwords and if I make one sale I’m thrilled! At this point I’ll take anyone who is reading my words- legally or not, paying me a damn dime or not. Perhaps in 10 years when I am a AUTHOR with some backing behind me.

What I do want to do though is just put an author’s point of view.

However, before I do that let me also say I believe the argument that e-books will cause the death of print books is fallacious. Radio, television and the internet haven’e caused the death of newspapers. They may have casued the industry to re-think its production and marketing strategy but, in the end, all can exist alongside each other because it is not an either/or situation.

Back to my main point. The issue concerning passing on copies of books whether they be print or electronic is, from the author’s point of view, based on two factors. The first is that an author wants to become as widely known and read as possible, so lending or donating to a friend a used copy is great. Illegal copying is a different matter – that’s what copyright law is intended to prevent, even though it remains clumsy and confused at present. So, from this author’s point of view, any act that effectively spreads my fame is great, any act that purposefully does me out of a sale by ‘cheating’ on me is not. The dividing line can be quite thin.

Chris Warren
Author and Freelance Writer
Randolph’s Challenge Book One – The Pendulum Swings

your audience just skips right over this part, eh? it’s a marvelously imperfect article, the message is fairly sound but for some nitpicking- the errors are not as grave as the ones being made (and the fallacies justified) by the old guards of industry- i’m not sorry you wrote it. if it makes one person think and a few others keep their misguided position, it was worth it.

Every new tech that comes out everyone is bound to try the same strategies to maximize their slice of the cake. This played out recently where ‘ebook’ rights were magically not part of ‘printing rights’ and people were litigating over who actually owned the ebook rights.

This is incredible non-sense. What about public domain books? Am I supporting piracy if I lend a Nietzsche book to a friend? Of course not. The only thing it happens here is that the person who I lended the book will not spend/waste money with something he don’t need. Is this bad?

When you sell a book, you’re not selling the knowledge in it. This is universal. What you’re selling (with profits) is the costs involved in making and distributing it, in the publisher side. This is another history in the author side. If you learn something by yourself, and another person learned the same thing by a book I published, can I charge for it? Can I charge you by this comment?

Music industry lost the way, a model to maintain their profits, just because Internet is a whole new thing, not just an electronic or digital way of doing the same thing.

I think the e-book industry hasn’t begin yet, but are already thinking the same way the old music industry.

As others have pointed out, paper, print, binding, shipping, etc. is only a small part of the costs of creating a book. A good explanation is here:
http://theharperstudio.com/2009/02/why-e-books-cost-money-to-publish/#comment-1576

The idea that e-books are magically free because you’ve already spent to create the paper version is circular logic at best. You have to pay for that creation, otherwise you go out of business. E-book sales can certainly be part of your business plan, but you need to amortize the costs of creating the book over both the print and the e-book versions and price accordingly.

I have read figures like “1 in 5 books turns a profit” and “50% of books printed are pulped”. I’m not sure how printing, shipping, shelving, returning, & pulping of half the books printed can reconcile with the paper and print being $1 a copy on a new release. Does anyone have references to cost breakdowns in the industry?

re: cost: the cost associated with getting an ebook into a customer’s hands is much less than print, considering no paper & ink, no warehousing,no shipping/fuel/labor, no packaging, no unpacking, shelf stocking, no book returns, no remaindering fees from your distributor. Granted, if ebooks continue to grow in market share, then it’s only fair that a greater percentage of the cost of producing the book (acquiring the rights, editing, cover design, marketing/sales) should be allocated to the ebook, so its fair share of pre-print production expense will increase relative to print over time.

re: lending. ebooks don’t lend themselves well to lending, unless DRM is involved.

re: ridiculous statement… Right, it’s not piracy, though it does deny the author further compensation. I thought the next sentence clarified.

This one ridiculous statement blows your entire argument. Too bad, it had promise.

Analogies between paper books and ebooks are full of missunderstandings. For instance, you can lend an ebook to a friend. The only problem is that just like with paper books, you will not be able to have it at the same time. It seems fair, doesn’t?

Zombies, dying… i don’t see quite seriousity in the writting of that.