alt Hacker NewsBut let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.
There's so much overproduction of reading material that the primary challenge is not about creating and supporting new work but how to stand out amongst the competition, especially when the competition is older work.
The older works are perfectly fine, they just needs to be resurfaced so that people don't go working on materials that other people already written. That means these materials should be widely available, such as being in the public domain.
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simonh • today at 2:45 PM
If there's so much overproduction, just go read some other stuff instead.
To go a step further, no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means.
You want be an astronaut? You have to work your way through the program, competing with all the other candidates.
More people want to be authors than astronauts. The competition is fierce. The market is what it is, and piracy is part of it. If you can’t deal with that (financially, emotionally, whatever), then you probably should not be an author. Being an author does not entitle someone to make a living as an author.
Intellectual property laws are regulatory capture of published works. As we know, they don’t work particularly well, but people still want to make their living using that leverage. At the cost of everyone else in society.
My advice to those wishing to publish anything: do not expect anything in return.