A bit from there and here

Mr Bingley: Oh my gosh, that's wonderful! When did Elizabeth tell you this?

Mr Darcy: When I proposed to her.

Mr Bingley: ...

Mr Darcy: ...

Mr Bingley: You proposed to the sister of the woman you said I shouldn't marry because of her family's unsuitability?

Mr Darcy: If it helps... she said no

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

Yes, you can make very valid arguments for pirating textbooks, medical texts or other books that are necessary for your survival or the betterment of your life. But as everyones derogatory comments in the notes already show, we all know Booktok books don't fall in that category. If you think you have a right to read because reading will make you more intelligent or empathetic, you still must admit that some books have no such effect. They're just entertainment, and thats fine, but it's also a luxury! It is not something you NEED, let alone something you have some unalienable right to. And honestly I don't even care that much if you pirate a book (some people really cant afford to buy it or have no other way to access it), but to act as if you deserve to read everything you want for free even though you could afford to buy it, is pure entitlement.

You are not entitled to perpetual "rent" from every person who encounters your work. It is unreasonable to demand payment from people who have no ability to pay. A right to be compensated for creating a work is not the same as a right to extract payment from every possible reader forever.

Once your books leave the publisher's printers, they become physical objects circulating in the world. You no longer have the authority to dictate every use of those objects. People may lend them to friends, donate them to libraries, resell them to used bookstores, or give them away. None of these actions requires additional payment to you because your compensation was tied to the creation and publication of the work, not to every subsequent transfer or use.

The same principle applies to digital copies. If someone uploads your book to the internet and it reaches people who would never have purchased it in the first place, that does not necessarily deprive you of income. Your payment came from the publishing agreement that enabled your work to be printed, distributed, and sold. The existence of a digital copy does not automatically create a new obligation for every recipient to pay you, particularly when they lack the means to do so.

The value created by your labor is the book that enters circulation through publication. That is the tangible product of your work and the basis on which you are compensated. Digital copies shared among people who cannot afford to buy the book do not generate additional value from which further payment can reasonably be demanded.

Books that are on library shelves, that are traded or donated, have still been paid for at some point and the range of their circulation is limited. But digital copies have unlimited circulation, because they do not require a physical copy to be transmitted or handed over. Where a few dozen physical copies might circulate through multiple hands, digital copies can reach thousands.

And in a marketplace where digital sales vastly outnumber physical distribution, if one can simply download a free copy of a book, well....why would they bother buying it? To support the author? To pay them for their labor? To support a niche genre or community?

I can tell you personally that it's highly unlikely.

I've been fighting this for ten years now, including Discord servers and entire websites which are dedicated to uploading and circulating niche category works like mine, because people are "entitled" to whatever books they want. And the responses I receive typically boil down to exactly what's posted above - that my intellectual labor has no value, that a stranger's desire for a free book is more important than my living, and that it's Not A Big Deal that I'll never see a penny for hundreds of copies of my work.

Besides, there is no academic consensus that piracy causes large sales losses across all forms of media. The evidence is mixed, with several studies finding little to no measurable effect in many cases and others finding negative effects only in specific contexts.

You're directing your anger at people who don't have the money to buy your books in the first place. If someone can't afford your work or refuses to pay for it, they aren't a lost sale, they were never a paying customer to begin with. Treating every pirated copy as a sale you "deserved" assumes that everyone who pirates would have bought your book otherwise, an assumption the evidence does not consistently support.

Books are a luxury. A luxury, by definition, has nothing to do with wealth. It is, pure and simple, something beyond what you need to survive. It's not about being entitled to sales. It's the simple fact that whether people can afford a book or not, they're more likely to take a free copy than buy one.

By your logic, if I were running a physical store and someone walked in and stole a box of books from my storeroom to copy and hand out for free, I should just shrug and say, "Oh well, they were never going to buy them anyway" and write it off. By your logic, why should I write books at all, if they're just going to be stolen? I've put out thousands of posts' worth of free content, but how dare I "gatekeep" or "paywall" my written works, how selfish of me to want, at any point, to be paid for my work and the product that I put on the literary market.

Furthermore, I don't need a university study to make my point for me. Because I have the date that my work was posted on a server, and I have the data from my digital book sales from the next three months, which took a STEEP fucking downturn and have stayed 30% lower than previous years ever since, even though the copy was (allegedly) removed.

Would I have been able to make a living from my writing? Thanks to a bunch of assholes on Discord, I will never know.

I know piracy isn't going away. I'm not arguing about laws here. I'm talking about my personal livelihood and that of other independent and small-time authors who are in the same boat. I'm asking people to fucking think before they go, "I deserve any and every book for free because I can't/don't want to pay for it," or assuming that authors are rich enough that we don't need or deserve to be paid for our work.

THAT is where I'm directing my anger - at people who think that it's less entitled to think they "deserve" whatever book they want for free than it is for an author to think they deserve payment for their work...and moreover, people who think that "LOL your book is probably mid and wouldn't have sold anyway, you should be grateful somebody thinks it's worth stealing" is a valid point to make to someone who has personally lost much-needed income to digital theft.

I am not a publishing house. I am one person with a small business. I ship books worldwide from my shop and I've made my books available on international sites like Amazon for broader distribution. I don't have a big publisher contract. My books aren't in most bookstores. I get paid per copy sold. Am I somehow meant to take on the responsibility for fixing international literature availability shortages?

If commerce infrastructure does not make my work available to purchase in a given location, is it then my job as a small-time independent author to just give my work away for free? Is it my duty then to forgo putting food on my table and keeping a roof over my family's head because someone somewhere can't afford a book? Are smalltime authors just meant to donate their work to whomever says they can't afford the price and never expect to be paid for it?

Why in the blithering blue blazes would anyone in their right mind expect a small business or a smalltime author to have the same capabilities and financial resources as a multinational corporation?

In what world does it make sense to blame individual authors for another country's lack of availability? If Russia decides not to make my book available for purchase because it's queer-positive, is that my responsibility to fix? If China chooses not to distribute my book because it violates a media statute, is that my problem to solve?

Here, let's bring the example closer to home. I'm based in the U.S. Because I'm independently published, the big chain bookstores here won't carry my work. So there's every possibility that a person might ONLY be able to acquire my titles in a library or by buying directly from me or through a site like Amazon or Bookstore. If someone can't afford the cover price, should I just give them the book for nothing? How many copies am I meant to give away before I start telling people to save their pennies or put it on a wishlist?

And let me be perfectly clear - Of the sites and servers that stole my work and redistributed, three were based in the U.S., one in Canada, one in the U.K. and two in Australia, all places where my work is readily available for purchase on multiple platforms. Russia and China aren't the problem. The entitlement call is coming from inside the house.

Do you do your job out of the goodness of your heart without expecting to get paid? Or might you be a bit miffed if your boss decided you weren't getting a check this week because someone didn't want to pay for your services?

Juomatyty collection part 2 electric boogaloo