Monday, April 9, 2012

Can donations help (fight) piracy?

My views on ebook piracy are explained in detail in Free illegal knowledge and how (not) to deal with it, where I argue that it is essential for people to have easy access to books. Furthermore, once books are digitized it is impossible to "remove" them from the web, therefore conventional ways of fighting piracy by closing down illegal websites are terribly ineffective.

An alternative way to reconciliate the two opposing forces is making its first successful steps under the name The 99 cents movement. Many authors are currently selling their ebooks for $0.99 and many more remain consistently in the zone $1-$10 which is a good start, but the lack of academic textbooks in this range is disheartening. In this article I will argue that by having an easy way to donate money to authors, more people will be convinced to lower their prices.