The Poverty of Discourse, versus real poverty

November 13, 2022

Now is as good a time as any to mention that we have a problematic in this country right now where "the poverty of discourse" is opposed to real poverty.

The online book repository, Z-lib was shut down by the FBI yesterday. It's important to note that the voices often heard bemoaning "the poverty of discourse" these days, and (inappropriately I might add) linking that to the free downloading, or "pirating" of texts and books often, themselves, have no problem with real poverty. I've never used Z-lib or its like; but I am not writing this as if to assure somebody that I haven't. I consider myself more of a privateer than a pirate. I will plunder a library or a legitimate list of Google hits, but I don't go out of my way to get free texts online. 

I'm also not in dire poverty, but it strikes me that there is a certain absurdity in paying outrageous prices for digital copies of written works that may cause concern, even for authors themselves. And in the converse, it may also not concern authors, when people look for cheaper ways to download their works. It's primarily the publishers who are making more money from inflating the price of works that may be available online. Elsevier is one example of a company notorious for inflating the price of science articles, who has recently been suing against free release of them online. 

While this may be hitting actual authors of works harder now than in the past, according to some dispatches from the front, surely, a lot of that has to do with the way that publishers themselves are restructuring the publishing economy to put more onus on the authors themselves to do more of the publishing, which can be looked at as shifting the burden, such that the authors themselves now have to care about pirates where they might not have had to care about it before. 

There's so many marginalia about why this might be so, including that it's difficult to pay or subscribe or otherwise cross through a paywall, but the final estimation is that lack of creativity on the part of many online publishers, causes a resentment toward them above and beyond the standard resentment, that publishers eke out a lot more profits out of a piece of writing, than the writers ever will. 

And the bottom line, is that, in the Brave New World, the Wild West, that is the modern Internet, with the new ease of construction of any sort of thing envisioned in publishing before the Internet, what any publishing entity has to provide, is some thing above and beyond the clone, or a copy, of a paper and ink publication.