The Egatz Epitaph

Randy Cohen and his alter ego, the Ethicist, recently weighed in on a the ethics of pirating format number two if you already purchased format number one. In this case, surprise, surprise, we’re talking about e-books.

As a consumer who has bought music, for instance, on an original album release, a cassette release, a CD release, and—get this—the remastered, better-sounding CD release (that is, the way it was supposed to be remastered in the first place), I have some feelings about this. As a writer and publisher, I’d like to get paid for what I put out in the world. As someone who has been screwed for decades across a variety of formats, I’d like to say basta!

As a guy who created electronic media that was given away during the 1990’s, it hurts to see creators getting ripped off. Although I was paid by my clients, they often gave my work away as a loss leader. In actuality, I wasn’t ripped off. The Egatz Epitaph is a more accurate example of me giving away my work for free. I do it because it was fun to resurrect the old blog, and write in this style, which I haven’t for years.

It’s nice to think you’ll get compensated for the work you do. As an artist, I know this isn’t the case. Not by a long shot. I’d be happy if anyone was willing to pay me e-book rates for the eight books of unpublished poetry I’ve finished. This is where small publishers and their authors need to come together and do what they do best: get creative. The number of new poetry books, for instance, published each year can expand by an order of magnitude. With the stranglehold over traditional, conventional books now broken, as long as editors and book designers can do their work and do it well, a flood of good titles can now come forward. Whether they will promote those titles is another matter.

With Apple’s announcement of allowing self-publishing authors access to the iBookstore, a flood of bad poetry and fiction is on the way. We’ll see if publishers are going to be savvy enough to double or triple their new titles now that an alternative distribution method is available.

I like Mr. Cohen. I used to ride in The New York Times elevator with him, now and then. He seemed like a pleasant-enough fellow. I hope he continues to get paid for his work.