Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.
It may be a minority, but not all authors share your view. Paulo Coelho [1] says “a person who does not share is not only selfish, but bitter and alone”. Sorry gotta say it, your tone matches.
According to this link, Paulo Coelho has a net worth of over $500 million and didn't get there by giving away books, so perhaps your example is not well-chosen.
I can promise you that the site isn't the reason your book flopped financially. That is just what the vast majority of books do, especially ones on such niche topics.
Who fucking said my "book flopped financially" -- please, point that out. Oh, wait, you can't, because you just made that up. Fucking hell. This place sucks.
I'm sorry you feel that way and it's understandable to be frustrated by them allowing piracy of something you've worked so long on.
That being said, do you know if their offering of your material has had a significant impact on your revenue or is it more the principal of the matter?
This strikes me as a bit ironic, if you're serious, as you list your current work as covering the entirety of the Beatles discography. Are you paying them for the rights?
I actually think it's ironic for precisely that reason. Similar to covering music, there is a legal precedent for making books available in public libraries - though most cover artists don't pay the royalties, and in this case this online library is not paying the GP. In the case that GP did in fact pay the fee, I rescind my criticism.
My understanding is that libraries do pay fees to stock books, some of which goes back to the original author. Anna's Archive does not pay anything back to the authors.
I think GP's criticism is valid. The toplevel poster is creating work that leverages the creativity of others. Regardless of whether or not he's paid a fee to do so, it's still funny to see the indignation about sharing, when the person's current project involves using the work of others.
There is both a qualitative and quantitative difference between covering/remixing the art of others, vs. just putting the original up for ~~sale~~ free.
Well, according to the publicly available stats on annas archive, all versions of your book available there had 177 downloads combined. So it's probably not the end of the world.
I never heard of the site. But looking at it now, I can't see how it's anything else other than piracy.
I looked up one of my favorite authors ( https://annas-archive.org/search?q=scott+sigler ) and you can download practically his lifetime's worth of work in 5 minutes. This is not some author who lived 200 years ago - he is living and writing books now and this is his livelyhood.
I hope you wrote that book more for personal pleasure and fulfillment than monetary gain. Over 32 years, would you have to be a best seller given the price of your book on Amazon (without counting the free audiobook you offer if someone starts a trial) to be making a minimum wage.
If you did that for passion and the book is good, it will definitely have a bigger impact if people can read your stories without having to go through Jeff or a bookstore (many English books are very hard to acquire outside of the US).
So, rejoice in the fact that someone thought your book was worth making available for the few who even know how to use these kind of online libraries (most people in the world don't). Bitterness on loss of revenue is definitely not worth it, especially after having put 32 years of life into it.
Unfortunately I don't really care about 60s US tech "scene" but the cover seems nice.
Pretty presumptuous to tell someone that they shouldn't be paid for their life's work, and then to tell them they should be happy someone pirated it. For the exposure!
Don't modern artists do this all the time? I mean, if you understand that you exist in a digital world where copying data is not only free and easy, but also the simple nature of computers, and that people do it all the time, can you really be surprised when your digital creation that's put into this world is treated like everything else?
Cultures are created to protect power structures. Culture is the enforcer of authority.
Culture distorts principles in order to defend the authority of evil. Culture must convince you that it is not wrong when law subjugates your worth and destroys your freedom. Culture convinces people of this by perverting the concept of morality.
Morality is liberty. Immorality is evil. The exercise and defense of freedom are moral. The destruction of freedom is immoral. This is the pure truth of morality.
Prudence is the proper application of principle. Imprudence is foolishness. Prudence is not morality. It is not immoral to kick a heavy stone with your bare foot, but it would probably be foolish. Prudence is a question of applying the principles and wisdom you have gathered in your life to achieve the goals you have for yourself. This is made possible by liberty. Without liberty, prudence is meaningless. Morality must come before prudence.
The great lie of culture is that authority is not bound by morality, and that authority can enforce its own prudence upon you. The great lie of culture is that you are worth less than law.
Cultures teach that intentions of prudence can be enforced by law. In this fashion they gain excuse to control the lives of people.
In order for people to learn, grow, and find happiness, people must be free to test their understanding of principles. With freedom, they can do this by a process of faith, trial and error. In this fashion children grow from immaturity to maturity. In this fashion human beings gain wisdom.
Cultures are agents of evil. The objective of evil is the damnation of your ability to grow strong in wisdom. The objective of evil is the destruction of your worth. In order to gain control over you, culture spreads the lie that authority is not bound by morality. It teaches that authority can destroy freedom at will, and claims prudence as the reason you should willingly submit. In the name of defending you, culture claims that the destruction of freedom is morality. Cultures pretend that evil is good and that good is evil.
Prudence can be found all around you. It is found in the choices you make every day. Even when a mistake is made, you learn prudence. Prudence cannot be enforced. To enforce prudence is law. Law is lie. Without the freedom to choose, you cannot learn prudence. You cannot be happy.
Morality can be found all around you. Wherever you find it, you will find joy. Wherever you find immorality, you will find misery. Culture enforces authority by destroying freedom with law. This is immorality.. - The End of all Evil, Jeremy Locke
You have invested in an idea that has been created by power structures through culture, that you are getting harmed by someone else's freedom. The people that will/want to support your work will do so out of a desire to do so, not because law says its right.
Many people are deceived that law breakers are immoral and harmful to society, but I don't think that's the case. Most laws are created to subjugate people, (I.E, take away there agency) Law's created by power structures which are ultimately designed to benefit the creators or supporters have done a very good job and convincing the subjugated that their interests align. Those that have been deceived by a system of laws that benefit the powerful are too invested in demanding a return for their efforts. What ever happened to the priority of making the world a better place first and foremost and having faith that you will be compensated in some fashion for your efforts?
I think you must be using an unusual definition of culture. As I understand it, culture is, broadly speaking, the shared values and practices of a group of people.
The only way to avoid having culture, in the usual sense, is to prevent groups of people from existing.
It is unusual. We have been condition to believe that culture is created by shared values. But actually is guided and molded by authority to create the illusion that its driven by society. Obviously this isn't true in all cases, but for most, its my belief that it is.
People can exist out side of the constrains of a culture that is imposed on then by understanding their own human value and worth that they are born with instead of looking to institutions and governments to give it to them.
In a society that doesn't have a centralized governing factor where the powerful impose their will on the people, then yes, I agree that its created by a shared understanding by its people. But that's not the case for 95% percent of the worlds cultures.
Oh, gotcha - if you'll permit me to paraphrase: it's not culture itself that you find evil; but that the powerful tend to warp the culture to protect their own interests.
Right. IMHO culture, at least for a very long time now, is used as a vehicle to push agendas, and people should be very wary about what to believe from what society says about a great many things.
I would agree if those shared values and practices grew entirely organically. But unfortunately people in power have a lot of, well, power, to shape culture.
Well Wizardry was written by two PLATO gamers at Cornell, a university that had a PLATO terminal or two connected to the U of I system. Very much inspired by PLATO games like Oubliette and Avatar.
Sadly this article is, per the tradition over at Ars Technica, quite misleading.
Bottom line: if you want to understand the actual history of the online world, don't read Ars Technica. They don't get it, they've never gotten it, and you're just being fed mythology and selective history in the same mold as WIRED before it.
They should know better. The author of the article absolutely has no excuse. But still, they actually public "architect of our online age" when that is NOT what Ward was at all. He was a latecomer. The online world was already booming in 1978.
Fast Company has been advertising dressed up as mid grade journalism for as long as I can remember. I think they're exactly where and what they want to be.
After getting to know the Boulder-area TechStars people, I tried to get a TechStars "chapter" going in San Diego back in 2010 and like so many things about the startup world in San Diego, it just wasn't going to happen. The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world. Plus, in general I found mentoring San Diego tech startups to be essentially pointless: nobody listened, nobody cared, so why even bother. Finally I found the core TechStars organization to be a bunch of cats, un-herdable, no "there" there. I never liked the whole "star" thing as it reeked of "rock stars" and was a little too "bro" for me. Bottom line, it was screamingly clear TechStars was never going to compete with YC (which I've never been a fan of either, but at least they're organized and determined and focused), so no surprise when it never did.
> The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world.
Sounds positive to me. Fuck your “world changing” startup idea. That’s just religion. You want me to work hard, treat me with respect and pay me (in that order).
edit: mark my words, there will come a time when you lose a highly valuable employee because you thought it was easier to treat people like a kubernetes configuration.
Its a startup. You will become fantastically rich as a founder/early employee if the startup takes over the world. You don't take over the world working a 9-5.
People entering this environment SHOULD know what they're signing up for. Its not like startups are the only jobs out there.
You will become fantastically rich as a founder/early employee if the startup takes over the world.
While this is still generally true for founders, it hasn't been true for early employees in over a decade. VCs decided to capture all of that surplus for themselves.
I think if we made starting up more accessible & possible, if healthcare & child card & housing weren't a mess, we'd actually see far far far far more positive world changing shit coming. And many tiers of merely good positive economic contributors below that.
Startups should be accessible. It's a fault & a problem that so many possibilities have been winnowed away. The glory of 120 hours a week is not the only path.
Health insurance coupled to employment is one hell of systematic advantage for large companies when competing for labor. Bigger company = bigger risk pool.
There is nothing wrong with being a startup and being solidly profitable, you know?
Only VC-backed startups need to "take over the world" because the VCs need their 10x rockstar.
A company doing $50 million per year with a handful of employees is going to be way more profitable for everybody than a VC-fueled rocket that has a 99% chance of flaming out. Remember MP3.com? Lots of San Diego tech people still do ...
I view the original assessment as "San Diego tech workers understand the reality of their value and can't be taken for a ride by venture capitalists--woe is me."
I found that San Diego tech workers generally have higher clue than most geographic areas.
The less experienced are very solid workers and learn really quickly. However, they're not 4 year Stanford students with filthy rich parents who can afford to go bankrupt multiple times. They're coming from community colleges and state schools, and they need to earn money. In return, they'll work their ass off for you.
In addition, there are quite a few very experienced greybeards scattered in that scene (tech in San Diego goes WAY back--Linkabit spawned a bunch and computers were huge early--Silicon Beach Software and PC Power and Cooling for example). However, they are going to demand appropriate compensation and will not put up with bullshit. I love working with them.
Don't like the San Diego tech scene? Your loss--my gain.
Nah the original assessment was too many San Diego tech workers would rather go surfing or play networked first-person shooter games than get something momentous done. There was always something more important to do than do the work and build the thing and make a difference in the world. I did the San Diego startup scene for 25 years. I worked at MP3.com; employee 12 I think. I also started 3 companies in La Jolla, was very active in the SD startup scene for many years. There are great engineers there, don't get me wrong. But the work ethic is simply different than SV, which is just the way it is, not gonna change. I don't think I'll ever do another startup in San Diego though. Elsewhere, sure, but not there.
Used to run ads in 1988-90 in ComputorEdge for my first startup (Coconut Computing; we ran the COCONET online service in San Diego then). Didn't they change their name to ByteBuyer? We used to call them ByteBuyor to pay homage to the original name.
