I bought a job lot of
20 second-hand books, dirt cheap on eBay. The author? Nora Roberts. They worked
out to be 50 cents each in the end. I blame author Anny Cook. She started telling
me about a couple of good Nora books to read, no, I’ve never read Nora and I
suspect Nora has never read Amarinda. Anyway, I took wise Anny’s advice and scanned
eBay and whiz-bang-presto – there were Nora’s books cheap.
So, what I want to
know is this – do authors like Nora get pissed that their paperbacks, once read
by the initial purchaser, are then sold second-hand? While everyone knows ebook
pirates suck big, hairy donkey’s balls, isn’t what they do kinda similar to
what the sellers of second-hand paperbacks do? They pass on ebooks to others. I’m guilty of buying cheap
paperbacks and I know I’m not the only one. Is it just because ebook writers
probably don’t sell as many as the Noras of the writing world that they get
more emotional seeing their books shoved back out there on the internet by
people who are not the initial seller and therefore the ebook writer doesn’t get the
income? The second-hand paperback market I’m sure doesn’t send Nora her cut of
the 50 cents per book that I just bought.
Just a thought…
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