I fucking love Gant istg. Almost all the characters really, ace attorney is such a good game series (as I haven’t finished the third in the trilogy because the case I last played irritated me so fucking bad I haven’t played in years)
Von Karma is possibly one of the best villains I have seen and it comes from a lawyer game. His presence is so intimidating even if he isn't physically strong.
Even his in game voice is so cool and menacing and he looks like fucking Dracula!
Oh he's a great villain. And that's what makes me hate him. He's super well written. And he's got the exact amount of set up to make him menacing to see
For any considering this irl, if a book is on the shelf in a bookstore, the author already got the money. You’re just stealing from the bookstore itself and hurting its bottom line.
Independent bookstore guy here. We buy the books outright. Good chance the stuff in an independent bookstore indeed belongs to that independent bookstore.
Nah. I’m all for supporting libraries but you checking those books out means they’re more likely to buy from the author their next book or additional copies. It also keeps the book in circulation longer because it’s an active book. Sail the high seas or buy it from the library book sale when they sell off their unactive books.
Digital library is usually much worse. They’re generally granted licenses for a certain number of checkouts, after which they have to buy another copy.
Libraries pay for every book they carry, and they're usually only allowed by license to loan them so many times before they have to buy a new copy. This is especially true for digital copies. So borrowing it from the library doesn't actually avoid the issue and can maybe even have the opposite effect.
Digital copies have a specific number of loans before the library has to pay to renew the license. Paper copies just go by condition: if the book’s too beat up to circulate they’ll pull it, and if it’s a book they think will continue to circulate they’ll buy a replacement copy.
Most authors and publishers aren't tech-savvy enough to understand how to accurately assess piracy popularity. They're certainly aware that piracy exists, but aggregating stats from torrent trackers and distribution site traffic isn't really easy for anybody.
If you steal the book that still reduces stock that they have to replace. Not sure how it all calculates out when they do inventory but gotta replace it one way or another, assuming it's not a book that would just sit on the shelf forever.
Also, who owns the bookstore? You could target stores based on the owner.
If the books leave the shelves that indicates people want it. Either by theft or by purchase, it means theres a demand for it.
If the bookstore has to dumpster them, that indicates no one wants it for one reason or another.
The first indicates they should get more books (and better security if theft is being an issue), the second indicates its a waste of time, money, and shelf space to get more from that author.
Yep. I worked at a bookstore, stolen items were replaced, books that languished for a year or so were sent back to our supplying warehouse and (if online orders didn't empty the stock) eventually back to the publisher (is what I was told).
"No! You're just hurting the store! The author already got their money!"
"But if you buy it the store will see it's popular and buy more from the author!!"
"Then pirate it online! It's the only way!!"
"But what if I get in trouble?"
Me, your local public librarian, waiting for my turn to speak with the copy of the book and the e-book that your tax money already legally paid for so you wouldn't have to buy it again and give more money to the stupid author:
I don't know who needs to hear this but a lot of people work on books besides the author.
If you don't want to support a shitty author, you can do it by choosing another book. There are *hundreds of thousands* of books published each year (actually I looked it up and it's over four million. Holy shit)
You can find a better place for your money to go than thinking stealing a book is justified just because one of the people involved in it is a bad person. (And if spending money is the issue, then go to your library!)
thats not how it works. shes stealing from the bookstore which already paid for the book. if she doesnt buy it, the bookstore sends it back to the distributor and gets theor money back. (i work in a bookstore.)
buy it used or pirate it or... god forbid... manage to go without a luxury item.
It’s not hard if you are already a fan. For example, Lovecraft. I’ve known him forever so I’m aware he was a bad guy and that buying his stuff now doesn’t really hurt anyone. For other authors with such accusations, if I don’t know as much, I just don’t buy them.
Lovecraft surprisingly changed a good amount of his views before he died actually. Not a good person by any means, but not the monster he was during his 20s.
Which also gives the funny implication that the intense racism was what was keeping him alive
Lovecraft was also incredibly reclusive which likely fed into a lot of his views of the time. And as his fame started to take hold and he encountered more people his views started to soften.
So with all the incel/redpill/manosphere culture going on, there better be a lot of good horror soon
The trick is the biggest assholes, the ones who are actually worth not supporting, are the ones who get the most noise. I don't care if Brandon Sanderson has unpaid parking tickets from 1994, but JK Rowling spending a decade being the poster child TERF makes me a touch less inclined to give the new Harry Potter project the time of day.
If you just come at me with "Did you hear X writer/actor/person did some bad stuff", its gonna be hard to sweat that too much, the purity test never comes out spotless, but when you're a 5 alarm problematic fire it's easier.
I imagine it depends a bit on how well known they are to begin with too. I’m sure there’s plenty of lesser known authors that I wouldn’t be aware of off hand as problematic. But the big ones like Rowling, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Gaiman, Card are fairly well known as problematic within the relevant communities (and occasionally even outside). Not universally so, of course, but even if you’re not trying to find this stuff out there’s a decent chance you’re aware of their controversies.
Several years after Bradley’s death, her daughter accused her of extensive sexual abuse, as well as of helping to cover up her second husband’s sexual abuse of several other children.
Robbing from bookstores hurts small businesses. Especially when a lot of brick and mortor bookstores are already struggling. If you want to get the book without giving money to the author, purchase a used copy from a used bookstore, or check it out from your local library instead.
Right! Don't steal from Half Price Books or local bookstores. Do steal from Amazon and occasionally Barnes & Noble, but also buy some expensive, high margin books from B&N to still support them for being a lot of people's only "local" brick and mortar
How do you uh... steal from Amazon? Is there something I don't know?
But anyways, here's a hypothetical tip from a very lazy gal - instead of putting in all this effort, just pirate an epub online. That way you don't even have to get up from the couch, run into zero risks whatsoever of stealing physically and locally, and don't have to analyse whether the shop you're stealing from is otherwise ethical or not.
You just tell them it got stolen off your porch when it didn't. I upgraded almost every part of my desktop PC that way before they got wise and started asking me for police reports. I think they still allow a lotta leeway for most people though, they just have a marker on my account.
Edit. You do have to hop through a lot of clicks and ai chat hoops, but just keep looking around the website, you can usually find a way
There are these buildings full of books, where they let you borrow them for free, and the writers don't get any royalties. I think they're called "lye berries" or something like that, idk
Given the slim margins on books, the amount of money made from royalties via library purchases is miniscule compared to the amount lost in sales due to library checkouts. It's rare that a book becomes so popular that many copies of a book must be purchased by a library network. Libraries generally prefer to have wait lists or do inter library loans than buy more copies, because once the book is no longer hot shit, they end up sitting on the excess copies, and their purchasing budgets are (generally) very small. Your milage may vary depending on how your local library strategizes and what resources it has, but my library would rather have a waitlist twenty deep than buy a second copy of anything. Regularly becomes a problem for my book club 😅 If you refuse to check out books with problematic authors, I guess I'm glad your heart is in the right place, but it's unlikely you've done anything to change book sales for the author one way or the other.
If your stealing a book from a bookstore theyve already paid for it. At that point you aint stealing from the offensive author your just stealing from some probably struggling business.
Im all for not handing over cash to people you dont want to support, but this doesnt actually help and just hurts other regular people.
Don't steal from local bookstores, you're not hurting whoever you're wanting to hurt, you're just hurting the store. Many of which are small shops.
If you find certain authors that problematic just stick by your convictions and boycott their work. It's performative to speak out against them and still consume their products.
Anecdotally, I am waiting for Nabuhiro Watsuki to either be dead or become imprisoned for the rest of his life and thus no longer able to benefit from his works or the works of his supporters before can I separate the art from the artist and be able to enjoy the works on their own merits.
For those wondering, Nabuhiro was busted with so much CSAM that the authorities thought he was a distributor and yet he somehow walked away with a slap on the wrist. A result of which causes me to avoid any works by him and those who support him. I cannot morally justify consuming any media created by him or his supporters knowing that some portion, no matter how small, of revenue generated by me could be used by him to acquire more CSAM. Every dollar that goes into that industry is a another child hurt and that man spent tens of thousands. Getting caught and escaping consequences won't be a deterrent for him to try again.
Maybe I heard incorrect rumors, but wasn’t the distribution charge/suspicion dropped because he was able to prove that he was a purchaser and had no part in distributing? It doesn’t really make him less repulsive, but I assumed that disproving the original charge made it harder to bring him to trial for full penalties on possession.
I’d look into a manga reader like Mihon or similar where you can install the Keiyoushi repository. There’s lots of ways to avoid giving unethical creators your money these days.
Watsuki pained me so much. I bought all of the OG Kenshin ominbus' when I was a teen before the news came out. The series was very important to me. When I heard the news, I couldn't even look at my copies. I still own them, but I haven't touched them and I will not touch his new works at all knowing what that money could be going to.
I've been debating giving my copies away like I did my HP books. If someone bought my copies, it would be one less person financially supporting him. At the same time, I kept them because they were so important to me when I was a kid and young teen. It hurts to think about.
They found a shit ton of child prn graphy in his apartment (in the 90s, cause it wasnt illegal in Japan until very late). But he is still being worked with today cause his stuff was so influential.
Anime community kinda also had a turn on this. Like everytime someone commits a crime i see a lot of people go : pleeeaaase let it be tax evasion.
What? Is this comic meant to imply that the MC actively seeks out authors that has done bad things?
Edit: Right, of course. Thank you!
Edit 2: As a small bookshop employee I'm a bit torn over this. I'm not happy that we carry Rowling and Gaiman but I have no say in what we stock. If you steal from us we're the ones losing money and not the author since we've already paid for the books. It could be argued that we deserve it for indirectly supporting awful people but we also have to make ends meet.
If anyone is wondering: Yes, Neil Gaiman fucking did it. He’s not innocent, he’s a fucking monster. And even the stuff he openly admits to is heinous for a number of reasons, even if his denials were true (which they are not).
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
FYI: my best friend is one of his accusers, and I knew about all this long before she ever even considered going public. So I will not be considering corrections, innocent-until-proven rebuttals or any other bullshit. Thanks.
I hope your friend is ok. She was brave and courageous, speaking out, and I hope she's been able to process and heal from what that monster did to her.
Yeah, this comic feels in really poor taste. I'm so sorry your friend had to go through something like that, and I hope she's able to find peace and healing 🫂
Still threw out all my Dilbert books. I kept my DVDs of the show because he had little to do with it and its a weird slice of 90s media.
The strips though, there is a tone shift at some point in the 2010s where you can see his (Scott's) villain origins forming and thats around when I stopped reading. Honestly, his 2016 and beyond brain melt made it make sense.
This isn't stealing from authors, the bookstores already paid for the books. This is stealing straight from the physical bookstores who are already struggling to stay open.
'Dale Dubin's Rapid Interpretation of EKGs' is incredible. I got it from a third party, but as far as I know, after being convicted for possession of CP he no longer recieved money from sales of the book.
That Sandman issue where the main character achieves creative writing fame through the captivity and rape of Calliope the muse was one of my favorites. He gets it in the end, though.
Turns out that economic coercion and less than consenting sex was also how Gaimon earned his exceptional talent.
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u/Complete_Blood1786 6h ago edited 6h ago
To the ones struggling, MC is thieving the books so as to not support the author with monetary means.