Cory Doctorow has articulated this issue very well. There is an excellent article from him at Forbes about this exact issue. One of the arguments he brings up is this.

“Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.”

So what struck me about the quote was the narrow thinking about sales. And it’s not that I have this crunchy attitude that everything should be free and people shouldn’t make money off their creative work (or the publishers that invest in producing and mass distributing the product to a large audience). But one of the points made in the Doctorow piece is that this is actually good business. His books are published by Tor, which is one of the largest Science Fiction publishers around.

So it’s great that the Man Booker Prize committee has taken this step. I just wish their thinking about sales wasn’t so limited to loss prevention.

(link to Times Online) (link to Forbes article from Cory Dotorow)

With the Federal Government’s queer interest in defining marriage it is amusing to watch this ad. I am thinking to myself: If your a young person that is gay, since you cannot be married (in some states) is it okay to have sex now? Even if you drop the idea of gay marriage, the ad still assumes that marriage will happen in this child’s life. I can see more ads subtly hint at absolutes in life. For example ads about eventually getting divorced, being overwhelmed by credit card debt and saying goodbye to those pesky civil liberties.