[WEB4LIB] RE: "Piracy is Progressive Taxation"

[Karen G. Schneider]

:I'm not sure I understand the "well-known as you wanna be." AL might
:seem a sufficient backwater to you that nobody reads it so publishing
in
:it amounts to not being published at all, but I'm not sure that
everyone
:would agree with you. All the writers I know who publish (and I know
:people who write exclusively for their own enjoyment and therefore do
:not even try to have their work published) write to be read. They think

Not only do I write to be read, but I (often) write for money--nice
crisp greenbacks in my wallet.   So I'm not sure where this argument is
coming from.  I was arguing that AL is NOT a backwater for my
community--with a readership of 60,000, it gets pretty darn fine
distribution--and that it didn't liberate me to the wide world of
information access to have my work stolen and put up for sale by some
honking big search engine, particularly when it was already freely
available.  

(Al pays pretty well for the library trade, by the way--I always feel
well-compensated for my work for AL, particularly since the copyright
reverts to the author after publication.)

I read his article and grasped what he meant--all too well. I was not
merely reacting to your post.  

Cordially, 

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Karen G. Schneider kgs at lii.org  http://lii.org 
Director,    Librarians' Index to the Internet
lii.org  New This Week:     http://lii.org/ntw 
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