Guest Blogger: Novel Piracy; the name, the look, & the need
Adrian Johns’ opinion on the nature of books in terms of trustworthiness is disheartening. On page 69 of his book The Book of Nature… he describes the factual nature of the novel as only pertaining to how the reader sees the text.
“Printed texts were not intrinsically trustworthy. When they were in fact trusted, it was only as a result of hard work, fixity was in the eye of the beholder, and its recognition could not be maintained without continuing effort. At no point could it be counted on to reside irremissibly in the object itself, and it was always liable to contradiction.”
Johns appears to believe that only the invention and execution of regulating principles, a copyright, and the author’s name as perceived by the audience lend credit to any work in particular.
Kristin Master of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America explains the history of copyright infringement. Strange enough, that sometimes the novel itself is not being copied, instead it’s the author’s name. Several famous authors throughout history have found their names to be misappropriated and used to sell books by anonymous authors. It appears to be the name itself that lends credibility:
https://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/1528-book_collecting_basics_pirated_editions.html
This idea of a work only being credible if the audience believes it to be so makes sense to me. It’s the whole ‘boy that cried wolf scenario. We’re more likely to believe someone who appears truthful -or in the case of authorship, happens to write some really great books – over someone we don’t know or someone who has a reputation of lying.
In contrast to Johns and Master, world famous author Jeffery Archer explained the sale of an estimated 50 million pirated copies of his book Cain and Able in India:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00e0Qk1ZaeU
His reasoning for those sales is not the trustworthiness of his name or the well-bound nature of those books, but the lack of an Indian translation of the book sold from his publisher. Well Archer sells millions of legal texts in other Asian counties, India is an a market with a high demand and absolutely no supply of translated novels.
In the case of pirated text, why have so many been sold? Because of high demand, because we trust the cover of the book, or because the authors name is so impressive that anything they write just has to be fantastic?
