Critical Animal on academic napsters

Critical Animal:

“I know there is a real push by many in the academic blogosphere to see a significant increase in things like creative commons and copylefting instead of copyrighting material. I have to say I see no problem with taking this further with academic pirating. But that is just the type of crazy marxist I happen to be.”

I do have a problem with it, but for different reasons than you might expect. Royalties are tiny for academic books, so there’s little loss for me there, and of course you want as many readers as possible for your work– which is much more valuable than the tiny royalty checks.

But I think that a pirated copy of Tool-Being, if it did exist (and Critical Animal noticed that it does not) would be terribly unfair to Open Court, the original publisher. They are not some corporate behemoth charging outrageous prices for their books. They’re a venerable but small operation still in the hands of the family that founded them over a century ago. They put a lot of work into preparing, promoting, and distributing the book, and they deserve not to be put out of business by rampant pirating of their work.

Granted, the whole traditional publishing model may be in trouble anyway, but businesses always have to deal with that sort of problem. And I might even secretly pump my fist in support if someone pirated some ridiculously overpriced books from publishers I won’t name who are famous for ridiculous prices. But I can’t feel too sympathetic about illegal activity with a concrete bad effect on a small business that needs to stay afloat through sales. If it were just a matter of me personally, I wouldn’t care if everything I ever wrote were pirated and I didn’t see a dime. But I don’t earn my meals through book royalties, whereas a small publisher does.