Are We All Breaking Copyright Intentions?

I’m worried that I’m a thief.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the “value of a reader” for authors. In that piece, I calculated that the average reader in the Netherlands reads about 531 books in their lifetime. I am not an average reader. My wife is not an average reader. I don’t track my reading on apps, so I never have an exact count, but since we both read before bed and seem to pick up new titles at the same rate (though we read very different books), I feel comfortable using her book consumption as a yardstick for my own.

It’s September, and according to her Goodreads account, she’s on book 54 of the year. Looking ahead, it’s very possible we’ll both finish over 70 books this year.

But averages don’t tell the whole story—especially when it comes to readers like us.

There are readers who put down even more books a week. Looking at median values I found in the United States, the median book consumption is just 4 books per year. That tells us a couple of things. First, there are a great deal of people who read no books at all per year. That’s a loss for them. George R.R. Martin said it best: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

For my purposes, though, these non-readers aren’t the focus. If you don’t read, then author support will ring hollow. Of far more interest are the outliers—the obsessive readers who skew the average. How might these people feel about supporting the authors they consume?

Readers can be obsessive. I am obsessive.

I’m currently reading the sixth book of The Suneater series. I started the first book less than a month ago. And these are long books. I remember reading the Murderbot novels one after the other on a road trip across the country. As we pulled into a big city, I’d beg my wife (girlfriend at the time) to take me to a bookstore so I could pick up the next one for the next eight-hour drive. I eventually caught up with the current publications and had to shift my purchasing from used stores to new stores.

That’s the best-case scenario for authors when it comes to used books: a reader picks up a copy or two of their backlist titles and enjoys them enough to seek out a new copy. This has been the status quo for decades. It’s a hopeful wish of writers that readers connect back to their current works. Historically, this has been enough. Historically, we haven’t been able to do better.

But that joy came with a cost—one the author never saw.

I enjoyed the hell out of the first five books I read. Some were given to me by my stepdad, who turned me onto science fiction in the first place. I bought the final two from used bookstores. I benefitted from each and every book. I read seven of them in the span of a week and a half—these are small books, I promise.

Here’s the final source list:

• 3 books from my stepdad

• 2 from used bookstores

• 2 from new bookstores

In the dialogue between author and reader, the author spoke to me seven times. I only spoke back twice.

That’s pretty messed up.

The publisher, looking at the performance of the author’s books, isn’t getting the right data. This is a structural failure. That loss propagates across the reading ecosystem. And while the fine details may not matter for the biggest writers, capturing reading trends can be transformative for smaller ones.

Beyond data, there should be revenue for authors from secondhand sales.

Copyright is defined as a legal right that gives creators of original works exclusive control over their use and distribution. It protects intellectual property by granting the owner the right to copy, publish, and distribute their work, as well as the right to authorize others to do so.

But in the used marketplace, that right is watered down. Distribution occurs outside the sphere of control of the copyright holder.

This isn’t just a personal failing—it’s a structural one.

The most screaming example of this is when Anthropic wanted to train their AI model on large amounts of books. They scanned and imported used books. Although this plan may not have worked—we’re seeing the settlement now, of course—we should pay specific attention to the fact that when looking for the source of written works that posed the least risk of copyright infringement, used books were selected.

That was a failure long before those books were used to train a large language model.

If a weak spot is discovered and exploited, it should be a warning. We should ensure that defenses are built up so that same angle of attack cannot be used again.

We have a system in which authors are not being rewarded for their work. A writer without an audience is just churning out paperweights and wall decoration. A reader without any writers is going to be pretty damn bored.

This relationship is just that—a relationship. If we as readers don’t step up to support it, then we’re failing our partners.

So let’s go back to those reading rates and tie this all together.

If you’re a reader who reads four books a year, then the support of a writer may not seem urgent. Author Advantage wasn’t built for you. I built it for myself and all the other obsessive readers.

I’ve been selfish. I’ve taken for years without giving.

My bookshelf was once a source of pride. Now it gives me the same sort of feeling I get when I visit the British Museum. Sure, those artifacts are cool to look at. Sure, it’s nice to see a history of where you’ve been. But at the end of the day, it seems like almost everything is stolen.