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Why are we doing this? Simply put because we despise copyright – we are crazed ideologues intent on the notion that ideas and knowledge are free and we're keen to smash the corporate machine that would try to monetise and control words like they could ever be anyone’s property.
Not really.
In fact, we’re very civilised people with a great deal of respect for copyright. We just can’t understand why more people aren’t doing this.
We don’t need to get really into this – we’re sure you already have your own opinion – but, anyway you look at it, the debate around copyright (and technology’s part in its apparently imminent downfall) is quite heated right now.
The record industry and the music industry look at filesharing – peer-to-peer networks, BitTorrent – and they get scared. Which is fine. They probably should be a little scared. They’ve got a lot of money riding on this but the game’s changing and they’re not so sure they understand the rules any more. That has to be scary.
But the way they’ve been reacting – the wild suing of fans, the mangling of their own products with autoimmune technology, the demonising, the doomsaying . . . it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s self-harm driven by ignorance.
People want what they’re selling. We like going to the cinema but, once we’ve paid for our ticket and taken our seats, we don’t like to have a booming voice insinuate that we’re criminals and insult our intelligence with misinformation. We like buying music but we don’t like having legitimately bought CDs gum up our computers with nonsense copy protection.
Publishing, to a lesser extent, has been demonstrating similar machine-breaking Luddite tendencies (just ask Google Book Search). It’s been the way just to fear the worst and withdraw, rather than give any thought to whether there might be some good to come of the possibilities of new technology. There’s an unwillingness to give up control.
But we’re happy to give up some control. Creative Commons makes it easy to do so in the way we want (feel free to take the book, but don’t use it commercially or without attribution) and we just want more people to read the book because we think it’s good and it deserves to be read.
OK, we’re not completely idealistic – we also want to sell a few more copies. Is that so wrong? Here’s why we think that might happen:
People like books
Books are great. You can take them on to the bus or into the bath. You can do that with a PDF, sure (well, on to the bus, anyway), but reading a whole book from a computer screen isn’t much fun (not if you like your eyes). And printing out 300 pages (or, in this case, 449 pages) is impractical and cumbersome. Who wants to have to lug a sheaf of A4 around with them? So in a way (don’t tell anyone this) we’re not really giving the whole book away for free – we’re hoping that you’ll flick through the PDF and, if you like it, you’ll pay for the convenience of the hard copy. Cynical, eh?
We’re just looking for attention
The fact is that, as a small independent publisher, our biggest problem isn’t holding back the bootleggers. The biggest obstacle for our books is manoeuvring them out of obscurity. What we need to do is get people to give them a shot (they might just like what they see) and this is another way of doing that. The idea that the occasional person might read the book without paying for the privilege doesn’t cause us any pain at all. (And we don’t quite understand those publishers who that thought does seem to pain. Do these people never borrow books?)
In fact . . .
We like the idea of people reading our books – and so does Suhayl. He’s a lovely, talented fellow and nothing would give him greater pleasure than the idea of somebody finding and enjoying Psychoraag who might not otherwise have done so. He wrote it so people could read it and we’re happy to try and help him out with that.
We hope that makes sense. If not or if you have any other questions (or you’re just not quite bored to tears by all this exposition yet), then please feel free to contact us.
And please do go and read Psychoraag. We’d like that.