World Book Day 2013

It’s World Book Day – so why not go to an indie bookshop, pay good money for an actual book, thereby supporting the people who make & sell them? Or if you have no money, go to a library and borrow books, knowing you’re supporting libraries and writers.
What you might not want to do is assume books are, or should be, free. Pay peanuts, get 100 monkeys.

Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments from the big guys saying how well they do by giving away stuff for free, they can afford to say that, they’re ALREADY successful. I’ve heard the argument that says it’s good for us to give stuff away, we get name-recognition. I don’t need more name-recognition, I need money in the bank so I can make more work, that work I make for ‘free’ until I can sell it – the plays, books, film scripts etc I’m making right now, for ‘free’, until I sell them. I don’t have a private income and I don’t have rich parents (they’re dead anyway, there was no inheritance) I do need to earn my way. But the basic point about piracy that really gets to the nub of the matter is this – microsoft and apple and dell and everyone else don’t give away that hardware for free. That hardware the copyright thieves use to download our work. So the ‘pirate’ is STILL paying the vast companies while stealing from us individual workers. Way to support the system, pirates!

Here’s a piece from last year about copyright piracy, or as I like to call it, theft.