Steal This Genre
Here is an article by Cory Doctorow that again touches (among other things) the subject of online “piracy” of books (it doesn’t usually involve steering ships, launching cannonballs and inflicting body wounds, hence the quotes in “piracy”).
I’ve discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF writer’s biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy.
Baen Free Library operates since 2000 with legally free works of many authors, among whom we meet names like Bujold, Niven, Saberhagen.
And here’s video recordings of three lectures of Cory Doctorow, Richard Stallman and Fravia from a conference called “Copyright vs Community”.
Oh, and btw, Cory’s main point is:
Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It’s the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere (yes, there’s also a brisk trade in comics and technical books, but I’m talking about prose fiction here — though this is clearly a sign of hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks).
I like to imagine this factlet whispers about a fine feature in the nature of Man, and that future society (if there is one) may consist of a larger percent of people who care about books and humanity.
(For those that didn’t catch the reference: Steal This Book)