Found at Teleread:
“We all love e-books because you can take that one download and send it to all your friends—so you have twenty of them instead of just one, and the publisher can’t track you down or do anything about it.”
Did a librarian from Baytown, Texas, in fact say the above at a “Sci-Fi Fantasy Convention in Houston”? If so, what’s the full context, and might she want to apologize?
The quote comes to us by way of Cornelia Amiri, a fifty-one-year-old novelist with 5,580 friends on MySpace. I don’t know Cornelia, aka the Celtic Romance Queen. But I doubt she’d go out of her way to alienate librarians or fans. If anything, she strikes me as more tolerant of pass-alongs than would be most writers and publishers.
And the context is….?
It is impossible for any of us to fully understand the context. Given the quotes shown I would say they are entirely reasonable. In fact, there are authors and publishers that agree with this exact same idea (see Baen). So this is not a question of someone advocating something that the overwhelming majority thinks is wrong (murder, outright theft, assault, etc) but something that there are many different schools of thought.
Licensing agreements? Anyone?
Even setting the copyright issue aside, most publishers strictly prohibit mass distribution in the terms of their licensing agreement. At least all the ones I’ve purchased from.