“People Have Always Felt A Sort Of Ownership Over Art, And That’s Actually Good. It’s Why You Keep

The Disastrous Decline in Author Incomes Isn’t Just Amazon’s Fault

The bookselling behemoth is making life harder for writers, but so is the public perception that art doesn’t need to be paid for

“People have always felt a sort of ownership over art, and that’s actually good. It’s why you keep a book on your shelf and return to it, it’s why you hang a picture on your wall that speaks to you. But when this gets out of hand and you mistake access or a personal connection with your rights, as happens so often in our Internet age, it leads to a dangerous sense of entitlement. That’s why readers feel empowered to complain, directly to the creator, that a book or show doesn’t have absolutely everything they want: the romantic pairing they’d hoped for, the language they find most friendly, the ending they desired. And it’s also why, for instance, the last Harry Potter book leaked on the internet before it was officially published: fans saw the book as something they were owed, not the product of labor that deserved compensation. Not that J.K. Rowling needs more money—but she, and all authors, deserve to have their work recognized as work.

“Consumers hold a pernicious power, so this trend towards free content won’t reverse itself unless we want it to. This is a sad thing, and we will all be much worse off if we can only hear stories from people who can afford to write.”

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red-prince-lio

3 years ago

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red-prince-lio

5 years ago

Exactly!!!!! But you don’t know what you should do because everyone’s just staring at you and making snide comments rather than offering help!!!!! And if they decide you’re asking too many questions or ask them to repeat themselves, they get irritated and tell you you should already know that, or they just told you, but they told you in a way you just can’t understand! So then you stop asking questions, and then when you mess up they get irritated at you again because you didn’t ask for help!

I think that sometimes, having autism/ADHD is kind of like being in a country that speaks a language/has a culture you only know a little of.

•You think you’re good to go, but you get to your destination, and everyone’s speaking faster than you thought they would. You can only tell what a few words are.

•You can’t keep up with anything anyone is saying. They’re all speaking too fast, and all at once. You try to ask them to slow down and speak one at a time, but they brush you off.

•You go to a restaurant, and you think you know how to order, but you sit down and see things you never learned on the menu, and when it comes time to order, you can’t remember how to.

•When you look around, you can’t quite understand what all the signs and store names say. Slowly, you get a headache from reading them and trying to translate them into something that makes sense.

•When you do something normal in your country, people stare at you like you’ve grown a second head. You don’t understand why—it’s completely normal to you, something you do all the time. When you explain this to them, they shake their heads and click their tongues at you and make a generalization about your country.

Idk, this is just kinda how I view it!