Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

No I do take your point about the price of books. (though I'm sure you wouldn't condone people stealing actual books from bookshops because they were too expensive to read otherwise. and that's pretty much the same, surely). It's particularly factual / textbooks that cost lots of money isn't it, and that's because they don't sell many. And lots of people that want to read them ie poor starving students can't afford them. But they could go to the library, and the library has to pay like a royalty every time the book is issued yknow. Then some money is going back to the writer.

That's an achievement, that you've written adn published a book yourself. Maybe some of those people that read it having borrowed it, they might then consider buying it themselves, ok you might make a few sales out of this borrowing? And you might argue that this is the same situation with the ebooks, you read it and then you think 'ok maybe I will shell out for it', and the author makes a bit of money they wouldn't have done.

But I think that's a bit of a red herring, because people have always lent out books to their friends, so the amount of sales you lose / gain from this has been ever so, it's the same then as now. But with the internet and illegal uploading, isn't the scale entirely different. One copy doesn't do the rounds one person at a time like a real book, it can be copied thousands of times and be in thousands of different places in a moment. Isn't that much worse, is that not worth kicking against? Isn't that why it's illegal, because it's actual copying, not serial loaning?

there's something nagging me about the whole 'something for nothing' attitude, maybe there's a kind of acquisitiveness angle that irks me. That there's hundreds of these books and you too can have them All! for nothing! - despite the fact that most people would never read a tenth of the things.

(sorry this is all a bit straight from brain to keyboard)