People have been pirating books online for 20 years and in that time the number of books published per year has increased 15-fold. A number of my favorites have been released in that time.
In a world without copyright, I can stand up a slick 100% legal website (and apps, etc) and distribute electronic copies of every single book (or whatever) straight to normies' phones, and I am free to monetize this scheme however I want.
You're underestimating how easy and common piracy is. You can get books, movies, or music with just a search, for free, with no consequences. It's generally socially accepted. This report tracked 216 billion visits to piracy websites in 2024: https://www.muso.com/blog/what-216-billion-visits-to-piracy-...
Music piracy is down just because services like Spotify let you listen to any song (for free with ads or with a subscription) and it's more convenient than pirating.
> I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).
Legal or not, this is exactly what happened. The piracy sites run ads and/or ask for donations.
I don't know which of your favorite books would have still been written without copyright. But I can say with confidence that the massive increase in the number of books per year over the past two decades would have happened regardless of copyright. It's been driven by lowering the barrier to entry for self-publishing, and only a very small fraction of them earn a living.
A surprisingly large fraction of my favorite books from the past two decades were published for free online by the author (e.g. Andy Weir's book).
Observations of fellow readers, conversations with self- and traditionally-published authors, and some knowledge of the market?
But what is low, anyway? For the sake of argument I could believe 10, 20, even 30% of all the books people read are pirated. I would be surprised if it was higher, but let's just say hypothetically it's 50%. I think that's a reasonable conservative estimate. So, in this scenario, the remaining 50% of reads can in principle be monetized by their respective authors.
Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere in this thread.^[1]. I consider that meaningful, and I have personally had conversations with published authors who state that the royalties they receive are financially significant, which is why I'm here in this thread taking the position that I'm taking.
> Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%
I'm in favour of copyright, though I think 70 years after the death of the author is so long it's silly. Even your grandchildren will have died of old age before your copyright ends.
In a world without copyright, I can stand up a slick 100% legal website (and apps, etc) and distribute electronic copies of every single book (or whatever) straight to normies' phones, and I am free to monetize this scheme however I want.