Spanish novelist quits writing books due to illegal copies
The newspaper The Guardian reports the award-winning Spanish writer Lucía Etxebarria will no longer be publishing books for a long time, because she is upset about the fact that readers have illegally copied her books.
The author says more copies of her latest book "The Silences of Content” have been downloaded illegally than sold. Furthermore Etxebarria would earn so little, she is considering changing jobs. In addition, she is considering to sell her books only in France and Germany, as the copyrights of authors would be better protected there than in Spain. She would like to see the Spanish government implement an anti-piracy act, but she claims politicians are too scared to act.
Her recently published book is not available as legal e-book, but can be downloaded in PDF format from various websites. The reason?
"We decided against publishing it as an e-book because that's easy to pirate. It would have been like throwing it straight to the lions," according to Etxebarria.
Reference: The Guardian
Comments(3)
Louigi Verona
A writer who writes because he needs to sell books is not a very important writer - or not a writer who really has something to say but rather to entertain.
Consider, say, Solzhenitsyn deciding not to publish his The Gulag Archipelago because it would be copied illegal. This is unthinkable.
The only reason I do have sympathy for this writer is because she was lured into erroneous thinking about the issue, by publishers and by the copyright propaganda.
Bart Schermer
And entertainers should not be entitled to an income because they do not write world literature?
phulshof
Entitled? No, of course not. No-one's entitled to an income.
In order to promote art and science however, we do need to make sure that artists get enough incentive to write. Whether that is through copyright or some form of compensation is a different discussion.
What surprises me about this story is the following:
1) She doesn't sell her work as e-books, because she's afraid it will be infringed.
2) She quits writing, because her work is infringed.
I can find understanding for one of the two positions, but both together is simply a matter of market fail.
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