Bruce.. (and Susan).. exactly.. why would anyone ? :)

Jon J... could poor sales be because of a poor book?

What's it about anyway?

I buy quite alot of books and gave up on Australian booksellers
over 10 years ago. Once Amazon came along, yippee! Three cheers
for the global economy.

Susan Hawthorne,

"I find it pretty amazing that intelligent peopl think that
a) all publishers are multinationals and
b) books don't cost anything to produce"

Nothing in my post - to which you responded - suggested either of these preposterous propositions, Susan. Why so defensive? No vested interest, eh?

The burden of my post was that under the current regime, at one book publication every two or three years, I cannot make a living on a 10% royalty basis and there's got to be a better and fairer way. I appreciate that publishers and booksellers too have costs to meet, but a mere tithe for the author who invented and conceived the idea, worked hard to research it and brought it to fruition though numerous drafts is unreasonable in anyone's reckoning except those in receipt of the other 90%.

BOAZ_David, my book wouldn't interest you. It's touches on human rights for vulnerable children and exposes the abuse by churches and charities. It would annoy you because it is based on actual cases and not on blind faith in the goodwill of men and woman of the cloth.

*I cannot make a living on a 10% royalty basis and there's got to be a better and fairer way.*

Ah Spikey, your problem just possibly is not the system, but it
is you. Now I know that nobody wants to hear that, but think about
it.

If you want to make a living from something, then its a business.
In that case, you have to make business decisions, or don't give
up your day job.

Let me guess, you wrote about this topic as you are passionate about
it. The problem is that clearly many other people are not, or
you would have sold alot more then 4000 books!

Now see the other side. A Richard Dawkins or other authors who
sell far greater numbers of books, would make a great quid, even
at 10%. Its purely a numbers game, a bit like music. Rock stars
make a fortune, but many would be rock stars, can only dream.

At 4000 books sold, I would say that nobody made any money really.

But in today's world, you can publish your own, sell on the
internet etc. Fact is that you need consumers to buy what you
produce, if you want to make a living from anything. It needs
more then passion.

The internet is a double edged sword for many. Its created a whole
new avenue of possibilities for information distribution, but fact
is people are suffering from information overload these days.

I would be surprised if book sales have not suffered, because people
can simply use their google bars for information. I gather that
major newspapers are now in trouble, so is the music industry,
as the world changes due to the net.

I have come to the conclusion that the whole idea of copyright, although it started out as a good idea to encourage authors, has become a huge racket benefitting multinationals, governments and distributors, in fact everyone except the author and the consumer.

Take the whole idea of incentive. Any mathematician can tell you that the value today of an annual stream of money over the next 20 years is almost the same as if the stream lasted forever. As a result, there is no real benefit to the author in extending copyright more than 20 years, particularly if it has been sold to a multinational.

The multinationals, together with governments, would like copyright to last forever, as it generates income for them both. So far they have stretched it out to about 95 years, and we can expect an extension when the classic hollywood films approach the end of their copyright. I am sure they would love to revive copyright on Shakespeare and the Bible if they could work out a pretext.

The major studios have never strayed from their ambition to extract a payment every time anyone views their product, and have burdened DVDs with regional coding, purely so that they can sell the same product for different prices in different parts of the world. They then complain bitterly when these technical roadblocks are circumvented.

The general public are on to this racket, and the Hollywood studios are sufficiently aware of the likely jury verdict if they prosecuted someone for copying a film off the TV or internet that they are currently trying to get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them.

In any case, as other posters have pointed out, the availability of overseas internet book and DVD purchases has made the whole previous arrangement obsolete, so why don't we just get rid of it.

I gather that an Anti-Copyright political party has been formed in Sweden. We could do with one here.

The elephant in the room is the digital reader. Amazon's "Kindle" is a "generation 1" attempt. It's not bad and the technology will improve.

Wait another 5 years and we'll all be downloading our books and reading them electronically.

Digital readers also mean that some reference books – eg textbooks, computer manuals – never get out of date. For a small fee they'll be continuously updated.

Digital readers will also allow for other forms of media to be included along with the book. Within a few years the boundary between books and TV will become blurred.