By that logic, I hurt the author even more if I read the copy (which wasn’t free for me) and I don’t buy him/her a BMW.
And what if I don’t read it?
What if I just put it on the back doorstep and stare at it for a few seconds, and then ignore it. Is that any less harmful to the author?
Yes.
There’s a chance that in the future, you’ll decide to pay for it and read it.
Of course, buying it USED screws the author almost as badly, but then again if you buy it used, you’re driving up the value of used copies, and if a book’s used value is trading above its cover price, then it’ll get reprinted and the author will get paid again.
That chance is so small that I’d really like to know of any person who bought a paperback book without a cover, read the notice that the book was improperly retained, put it aside, and then went out to buy a copy with the cover. I’d really like to know if such a person exists.
Actually, I’d just like to know about people who buy books without covers. If the book can’t be sold, the only reason people are reading it is because they work for booksellers and can get it away for free.
If the book won’t sell in the first place, I’m not going to change my mind and go pay for it again.
You won’t run out immediately and get it, but you may decide to read the book in 5 years and buy it then.
Life is like that; I’ve thrown away books and bought them again a decade later.
I didn’t get to read that Niven I meant to read when I was 21, but I did get to read it last year, at 31.
Of course, I’ve gotten into the used book trade, so , uh… yeah, the only new books I’ve bouight in the last 2 years where just-released textbooks were there are no deals to be had.
If you are reading that copy instead of buying a new one, or you give (or sell) that copy to someone that would otherwise have bought one.
The remainder market and used book market don’t bother me at all. If someone picks up a used copy of one of my books and likes it, then he’ll probably buy a new copy of one of my others. That’s cool, especially since I’ve already been paid once for that copy. If there was no used book market, people wouldn’t buy as many new books.
As an author, here’s the scenario that bothers me: an unscrupulous bookstore wants to have a good stock of my books, so they buy double what they figure they can actually sell. They end up with extras, so they strip the covers and return them. The books with the stripped covers get marked down and sold. The bookstore makes three bucks on the full-price copies, and maybe a buck on the stripped ones. I get royalties on the full-price copies, but nothing on the stripped ones. The bookstore is ripping off my publisher and me.
DISCLAIMER: None of my books have ever been released as mass-market (strippable), so this hasn’t actually happened to me.
I’ve replaced coverless books I wanted to keep with good copies.
Remember, the number of coverless paperbacks floating around these days is tiny. Most used book dealers won’t touch them. I don’t even find them in library book sales, the kind where people dump all the old stuff they don’t want. We’re mostly talking extreme hypotheticals here, which is why you’re getting extreme hypothetical answers. It’s really hard to generalize about what a tiny group does.
Not every paperback publisher today even bothers to put in the stripped book warning. It’s too minor an issue to be bothered with. Other publishers probably got told by their lawyers at some point to do it and will keep on doing it until all their current lawyers drop dead of old age.
But as I said, at one time there were whole stores with thousands of these books. Back in the 70s good used paperback bookstores were rare. Good stores that sold new paperbacks were rare. Most people got paperbacks in drugstores and newsstands and other places that had limited selections. Standard book stores sold only hardbacks, and maybe some academically-oriented trade paperbacks. You literally could not buy a mass market paperback in most good book stores. The mall chain stores changed this, but they didn’t get big until later. Finding coverless paperbacks was often the first and only time people had ever seen many of the titles.
And you know what? That’s just as true today. Stores have so many titles that even a fanatic like me that obsessively goes to bookstores and libraries, and reads all the book news I can find, am still constantly surprised by stumbling onto titles I never knew existed.
It’s totally plausible that someone might leap upon a title or author and grab a coverless book when it’s offered. Some of them might go back to buy a good copy to keep. Or not. It’s all hypothetical. But I would still bet that “never” is not a good word to use in this case.
Only if the person handing out the copies had promised to give the author a B.M.W. Royalties of X amount are explicit and implicit in the sale of a book. Everybody knows that. I suppose authors could start asking for B.M.W.s in their licensing contracts …
Well, yes, but the question is whether I hurt the author by reading the book before destroying it. Let’s assume that it’s a book I wouldn’t pay cover price for. But someone says,“Here, this is a cheap book to pass your time on the subway,” so I buy it at a cheap price. Then I see that the cover’s been stripped, and that the publisher is saying that I’ve bought a stripped book. It was just a means of getting rid of something that wouldn’t’ve resulted in anything different.
I’m wondering whether this thread has the seed of a solution to one problem with eBooks, namely, the cost of replacing a large library of paper-based books with eBooks.
I’ve been able to replace all of my CDs with one iPhone. The only cost was the time to rip the CDs and then transfer the music to the iPhone. (I already needed a phone.) I didn’t have to purchase my entire collection again. (BTW, the iPhone is a very nice eBook reader.)
I’m certainly not going to scan my book collection, and I don’t want to pay several thousand dollars to buy the eBook versions of books that I’ve already purchased.
What if publishers would accept the book’s cover (and some other pages) in exchange for the right to have the eBook version? There would be a cost for the exchange and some of the money would be paid to the author. I would consider exchanging some of my books if the cost was, say, $5 per book, perhaps with discounts based on how many books I’m exchanging.
Maybe it could be Amazon (or eReader) that would process the exchange.
For those who have bought into the idea of eBooks, what do you think?
Let’s start a trend. I’m up for it.
Thus far, I haven’t been a big fan of eBooks, but I’d buy into this idea. I have a lot of old paperbacks that I’d get rid of if I could keep the text in eBook form. I wouldn’t do it with my collectible stuff, autographed copies, illustrated books and such, but it would be great for the mass-market novels.
As long as it wasn’t Amazon doing the processing. They’ve been instrumental in the death of so many indie bookstores I loved…
Replace “book” with “B.M.W.” Someone illegally acquires a B.M.W. and sells it to you on the cheap. Are you harming anyone by keeping it?
Probably, nobody but Strassia cares about this. For that matter, (s)he may have been asking idly, rather than being vitally interested and/or curious. 
But I just noticed a horrible error in this last sentence. I meant to say that I expect that no e-book reader will ever equal regular paper books in readability for me - though perhaps not in exactly those words. At any rate, I did not mean to say what I said. It’s the exact opposite of what I meant; sorry.
Before I knew what a stripped book meant, yeah, I bought some of them. Nowadays, though, I separate authors into several groups. The first group: I will buy new hardcovers by this author. If the book doesn’t come out in HB, then of course I buy the PB version. Very few authors are in this group. Second group: I buy new PBs. Third group: I buy new or used, depending on how much I want the book, and HB only in used. Fourth group: I might check out a library book by them, but I have no intention of buying and keeping a book by them.
My daughter worked in a used book store for several years, so I had the option of buying quite a few used books from authors I liked. But I made a point of buying new from these authors so that they’d get the royalties, and so they might be more interested in writing more books, and so their publishers would be more interested in publishing their books. If my copy of the book gets damaged, again, I’ll buy it new if at all possible, even though I could get it used.
That’s an admirable approach to reading, and a solace to authors.
However…So the only authors you would bother to read from a library are fourth-rate? I’d be curious to know which they are.
The real question for me is if I somehow buy a book without a cover, and then see that announcement on the inside cover that it was stolen, what difference does it make if I read it?
If I’m willing to buy a book without a cover, I’m willing to read it. That announcement seems utterly pointless to me. Whether I read it or throw it out is not going to affect the author or publisher one way or another.
I suppose I could report it to the publisher, as evidence of fraud.
Reading a book that has been sentenced to destruction is different from using a car that has has been stolen. Looking at the pages of a book that no one wants to buy is like looking at a billboard ad that no one pays attention to. Suppose I found the book in the gutter while walking down the street, Should I immediately look at the first pages to find this announcement that the book was “unreadable,” and then toss it away, because by reading it I’m hurting the author? I think any author would rather I read the book, since one way or the other, I’m not going to be paying (more) money.
Authors don’t mind if you go to the library and read one of their books. They don’t mind if you buy the book from a used book store. They don’t mind if your friend presses a book in your hand and says, “read this.”
So what’s the difference?
A stripped book is stolen property. It’s STOLEN. There’s no getting around that. If somebody were to take an HD set out of the back of an electronics store for you to watch the Superbowl on, the NFL doesn’t lose any money. But it’s still wrong. Why? Because the set is stolen property.
It’s the fruits of theft. Whether you find it on the street or steal it out of the store yourself makes no never mind. It’s still something that has been stolen from the rightful owner.
It doesn’t matter who the rightful owner is, or how much the property was worth, or how the payments might have been spread out. The fact that the property is stolen taints any other use of it.
That’s the bottom line. What comes afterward doesn’t say anything about the property, it says something about you. How you decide to respond to a temptation that you know is the fruits of theft is for you to decide. There is no one right way to settle the issue. There are many wrong ways, though.
It’s not too tough to figure out which are right and which are wrong in this particular case.
Party A: I will pay Party B $X for this car. All I want is to destroy this car, so I’ll trust Party B to take it to the crusher.
Party B: Takes the money but instead sells guizot the car.
All of my books have been released as mass-market PBs, and I’m pretty confident this hasn’t happened to me and hasn’t happened to anybody, at least as done by a bookstore.
What did happen was that I had a signing at a Barnes & Noble. Instead of going to the one where I was signing, a carton of books ended up at a different B&N on the other side of town. They got the carton, had no idea why they’d gotten it, so they threw a couple (literally, TWO COPIES) onto the shelves and stripped the covers off the rest and threw them in the dumpster. The B&N where I was signing, which also had, literally, TWO copies, plus another two that were on the computer but apparently not present in the store, called and found out that yes, the books had gotten there, no, they weren’t there anymore, and no, they weren’t going to send someone out to figure out which of the stripped books in the dumpster were my title and which were other people’s in order to have some books to sell.
Oh yeah, those stripped books counted against my numbers.
If B&N people, or the homeless, pick them out of the dumpsters, I don’t care. I don’t really see a huge market for coverless books, but if somebody sells one and gets money for it, more power to him. He’s not ripping anybody off, as far as I can tell. Once they end up stripped and in the dumpster, it’s kind of like finding a nickel on the street–do you try to find the owner of that nickel? If you keep it, did you steal it?
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Ugh. We should start a book signing horror stories thread, but we might scare away potential authors 